Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida ; French: ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004 was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a make of semiotic analysis requested as deconstruction, which he analyzed in numerous texts, & developed in a context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism & postmodern philosophy.

During his career, Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, architecture, and political theory.

His have retains major academic influence throughout the United States, continental Europe, South America and any other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, especially in debates around ontology, epistemology especially concerning social sciences, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. In almost of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is almost presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his joining with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture in the form of deconstructivism, music, art, and art criticism.

Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena 1967 to be his most important work. Others cite: Of Grammatology 1967, Writing and Difference 1967, and Margins of Philosophy 1972. These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work reported him controversial.

Life

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in a summer domestic in El Biar Algiers, Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish rank originally from Toledo that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles Aimé Derrida 1896–1970 and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar 1901–1991, named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although he would later adopt a more "correct" representation of his number one name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid. He was also precondition the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was non recorded on his birth protection unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name".

Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, main him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.

On the number one day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas line by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took element in numerous football competitions he dreamed of becoming a professionals such as lawyers and surveyors player. In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such(a) as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also referred Camus and Sartre.

In the slow 1940s, he attended the Lycée Bugeaud] on below. He then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.

Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard daughter of Gaston, Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur who in these years coined the term hermeneutics of suspicion, and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, offered birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an joining with the Tel Quel corporation of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, was connected to his reservations approximately their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

With "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come. Ason, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate from Columbia University and was awarded his State doctorate doctorat d'État by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the tag "" "Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing". The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the dominance of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ""; his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.

Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor at the in Paris from 1984 he had been elected at the end of 1983. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the CIPH; 'International college of philosophy', an institution specified to give a location for philosophical research which could non be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.

On May 8, 1985, Derrida was elected a Foreign Honorary an necessary or characteristic factor of something abstract. of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to a collection of things sharing a common attribute IV - Humanities, point 3 -Criticism and Philology.

In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of modern Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an effort to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007.

Derrida was avisiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by the Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.

Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by main philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted indications of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university".

Late in his life, Derrida participated in devloping two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida Derrida's Elsewhere by Safaa Fathy 1999, and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman 2002.

Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.

At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."