• Philosopher Jacques Derrida, 1930
  

Jacques Derrida published more than 40 books, together with essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence upon the humanities, particularly on anthropology, sociology, semiotics, jurisprudence and literary theory. His work still has a major influence in the academe of Continental Europe, South America and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant. His theories became crucial in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, esthetics, hermeneutics and the philosophy of language. Jacques Derrida's work also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music, art and art critics.

Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes. His work influenced various activists and political movements. He was a well-known and influential figure, while his approach to philosophy and the purported difficulty of his work also made him controversial.

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El Biar (Algiers), French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Toledo that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic - speaking Jews of French Algeria. He was the third of five children. His parents, Aimé Derrida (1896 – 1970) and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901 – 1991), named him Jackie, after American actor Jackie Coogan though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris. His youth was spent in El-Biar, Algeria.

On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti - Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche and Gide, an instrument of revolt against the family and society:

His readings also included Camus and Sartre. On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his philosophy agrégation on Edmund Husserl. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956 – 57 academic year reading Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, 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 assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term School of suspicion) and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and 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 assume 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. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books — Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

He completed his Thèse d'État in 1980, submitting his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project; the text of Derrida's defense 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 was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.

In 1986, Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. UCI and the Derrida family were later involved in a legal dispute regarding exactly what materials constitute his archive, part of which was informally bequeathed to the university. He was a regular visiting 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 Cambridge University (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, University of Leuven, Williams College and University of Silesia.

Derrida has often been criticized by academics, such as the analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. In 1992, a number of analytical philosophers from Cambridge University and external institutions tried to stop the granting of the degree, but were outnumbered when it was put to a vote. Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."

Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected; he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology.) He received the 2001 Adorno - Preis from the University of Frankfurt.

Late in his life, Derrida participated in two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida [Derrida's Elsewhere] by Saafa Fathy (1999), and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).

In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and traveling engagements. He died 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. Prof. Dr. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would resume 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."

Derrida called his approach "deconstruction". Deconstruction has become associated with the attempt to expose and undermine the oppositions, hierarchies and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded.

Derrida's strategy involved a phase of thinking in a dual way about everything, to the point that

... all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics

(signifier / signified; sensible / intelligible; writing / speech; passivity / activity; etc.)

- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present

(for example, in the form of the identity of the subject, who is present for all his operations,

present beneath every accident or event,

self - present in its "living speech",

present in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)

become non - pertinent (Positions pp 28 - 30).

Derrida considered that when encountering what he called a "classical philosophical opposition", one never encounters "peaceful coexistence" of the two opposing concepts, but rather a "violent hierarchy", where one of the two dominates over the other.

"In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand" (Positions, p.41).

In order to begin the deconstruction, one must break the link between the two opposing concepts.

To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment (Positions p.41).

But, as a second step, Derrida added that one must do what is needed so that the two concepts stay separate and non hierarchical. In order to achieve this, one must intervene in the field effectively, to create new marks, a new concept that no longer be, and never could be included in the previous regime.

Not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay.

Derrida said this phase was structural and that it was "the necessity of an interminable analysis" because "the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself".

The infinite task is then to show how every speech always dramatize this oppositions,

establishing an arbitrary center and an hierarchic relation

(body - soul, existing - being, passivity - activity, sensible - intelligible, receptivity - spontaneity,

heteronomy - autonomy, empirical - transcendental, immanent - transcendent, local - global, femininity - masculinity, animal - Man, beast - sovereign, etc.) (Positions p.42)

To mark the undecidable of all oppositions working across all texts in western culture, he created marks like

• the pharmakon - that is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;
• the supplement that is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.;
• the hymen that is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.;
• the gram that is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;
• spacing that is neither space nor time;
• the incision that is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary, etc. (Positions p. 43)

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors - texte),. Critics of Derrida have quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about."

The end of deconstruction has been trumpeted by many in academe since the late 1980s. Nevertheless, deconstruction and Derrida’s popularity continued to increase. In 2002 a feature length documentary on his life and work, filmed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, achieved commercial success in the United States as well as internationally. One of Derrida’s last public speaking appearances — in Campbell Hall at the University of California at Santa Barbara (late October, 2003) — produced attendance that exceeded the seating capacity of the hall (900). The continuing stream of books on Derrida — over 150 titles since 2000 versus about 25 for John Searle and about 40 for Richard Rorty, for example — indicates no abatement in the popularity of deconstruction in relation to other competing trends in Philosophy.

Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non - essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text, in a broad sense, emerges from semiology advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure.

Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language

In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.

Saussure explicitly suggested Linguistic was only a branch of a more general semiology, of a science of signs in general, being human codes only one among others. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, he made of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone". Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.

Derrida then sees these differences, as elemental oppositions (0-1), working in all "languages", all "systems of distinct signs", all "codes", where terms don't have an"absolute" meaning, but can only get it from reciprocal determination with the other terms (1-0). This structural difference is the first component that Derrida will take into account when articulating the meaning of différance, a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his lifelong work: deconstruction.  :

1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.

— "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions p.28”

But structural difference will not be considered without him already destabilizing from the start its static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs, remembering that all structure already refers to the generative movement in the play of differences.

The other main component of différance is deferring, that takes into account the fact that meaning is not only a question of synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also of diachrony, with everything that was said and will be said, in History, difference as structure and deferring as genesis:

2) "The a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation - in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being - are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance.

— "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” p.30

This confirms the subject as not present to itself and constituted on becoming space, in temporizing and also, as Saussure said, that "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject." Questioned this myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective") Derrida will start a long deconstruction of all texts where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the actual construction of meaning and values based on the subordination of the movement of "différance":

At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier / signified; sensible / intelligible; writing / speech; passivity / activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self - present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified."

— "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” p.30

But, as Derrida also points out, these relations with other terms don’t express only meaning but also values. The way elemental oppositions are put to work in all texts it's not only a theoretical operation but also a practical option.

The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc., would be to overturn oppositions:

On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.

To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.42

It’s not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be analyzed and criticized in all their manifestations; showing the way these oppositions, both logical and axiological, are at work in all discourses so that they be able to produce meaning and values.

When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.42

And it’s not enough to deconstruction to expose the way oppositions work and how meaning and values are produced in speech of all kinds and stop there in a nihilistic or cynic position regarding all meaning, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively". To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new concepts, not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay:

That being said - and on the other hand - to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new concept that no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. If this interval, this biface or biphase, can be inscribed only in a bifurcated writing then it can only be marked in what I would call a grouped textual field: in the last analysis it is impossible to point it out, for a unilinear text, or a punctual position, an operation signed by a single author, are all by definition incapable of practicing this interval.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.43

This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals:

Henceforth, in order better to mark this interval it has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text (for example, Mallarme), certain marks, shall we say (I mentioned certain ones just now, there are many others), that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which., however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.42

Some examples of these new terms created by Derrida clearly exemplify the deconstruction procedure:

the pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;
the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.;
the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.;
the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;
spacing is neither space nor time;
the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary.

But his most famous one is perhaps differance, created to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing

And this holds first of all for a new concept of writing, that simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech / writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of a writing within speech, thereby disorganizing the entire inherited order and invading the entire field.

Derrida devoted his life work deeply to the deconstruction of most ontological oppositions and its many declensions, not only in philosophy as in human sciences in general, cultural studies, theory of Law, etc. showing how they were dramatized in speeches during the centuries, each author giving it different centers and establishing different hierarchies between the terms in the opposition: the intelligible and the sensible, the spontaneous and the receptive, autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, immanent and transcendent, as the interior and exterior, or the founded and the founder, normal and abnormal, phonetic and writing, the literal sense and figurative meaning in language, reason and madness in psychoanalysis, the masculine and feminine in gender theory, man and animal in ecology, the beast and the sovereign in the political field, theory and practice as distinct dominions of thought itself.

The chiasmus thus become with deconstruction a larger movement of thought where we have to confront the intended simplicity of the most fundamental cleavages in tradition, realizing the need to think simultaneously, for example, the spontaneous receptivity and receptive spontaneity, the autonomous heteronomy and the heteronomous autonomy, the transcendent immanence and the immanent transcendence, the empirical transcendental and the transcendental empirical (to just illustrate here the pairs of opposites that will serve Kant to delineate the four main metaphysical antinomies)

In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is not to collapse in Hegel´s dialectic where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic whose telos would, necessarily, be to resolve it into a synthesis, The presence of Hegelianism was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the existentialism from Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida´s worry to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's one.

Neither/nor: that is simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.
In fact, I attempt to bring the critical operation to bear against the unceasing reappropriation of this work of the simulacrum by a dialectics of the Hegelian type (which even idealizes and "semantizes" the value of work), for Hegelian idealism consists precisely of a releve of the binary oppositions of classical idealism, a resolution of contradiction into a third term that comes in order to aufheben, to deny while raising up, while idealizing, while sublimating into an anamnesic interiority (Errinnerung), while interning difference in a self - presence.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.42

This difference from Hegel should be understood as essential from the start, and the Différance being one of the first terms that he tried more accurately to distinguish from all forms of Hegelian difference when proceeding with deconstruction.

Since it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel - a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is (interminable, at least if one wishes to execute it rigorously and minutely - I have attempted to distinguish differance (whose a marks, among other things, its productive and conflictual characteristics) from Hegelian difference, and have done so precisely at the point at which Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorize it, to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self - presence of an onto - theological or onto - teleological synthesis.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.43

More than difference is the conflictuality of difference that must be distinguished from contradiction in Hegel to clearly distinguish deconstruction from speculative dialetics:

Difference (at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel, everything, that is most decisive, is played out here, in what Husserl called "subtle nuances," or Marx "micrology") must indicate the point at which one breaks with the system of the Aufhebung and with speculative dialectics. Since this conflictuality of differance - which can be called contradiction only if one demarcates it by means of a long work on Hegel's concept of contradiction - can never be totally resolved, it marks its effects in what I call the text in general, in a text which is not reduced to a book or a library, and which can never be governed by a referent in the classical sense, that is, by a thing or by a transcendental signified that would regulate its movement. You can well see that it is not because I wish to appease or reconcile that I prefer to employ the mark "difference" rather than refer to the system of difference - and - contradiction.

— "Interview with Jean - Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” pp.44

There is one statement by Derrida which he regarded as the axial statement of his whole essay on Rousseau (part of the highly influential Of Grammatology, 1967), and which is perhaps his most quoted and famous statement ever. It's the assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors - texte), which means that “there is no such a thing as out - of - the - text”, in other words, "there is nothing outside context".

We can call "context" the entire "real - history - of - the - world," if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest dis­credit them. In the name of what, of which other "truth," moreover, would it?
One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.
The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ("there is nothing outside the text" [il n'y a pas de hors - texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.

Critics of Derrida have countless times quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction. Some commentators have said that it means that is not possible to think outside of the philosophical system, or that there is no experience of reality outside of language.

With regards to the broadness of the concept of "text", Derrida added:

On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as a historian:

Derrida's work centered on challenging unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly to Western culture as a whole. By questioning the fundamental norms and premises of the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. During the American 1980s culture wars, this would attract the anger of politically conservative and right wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.

Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.

At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."

Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post - structuralism. Near the beginning of the essay, Derrida argued:

(...) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.

— "Structure, Sign and Play" in Writing and Difference, p. 353.

The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.

In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of Structuralism, which was being widely favored as the successor to the Phenomenology approach, started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of Structuralism to a "Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate."

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience;” for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated — complex — such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.

Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.

On several occasions Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would have not said a single word. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self - presence in so called living speech and in self - consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same “Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"." Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas, these three books discussed, and / or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi - Strauss, paleontologist Leroi - Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud.

This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred / profane, signifier / signified, mind / body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.

In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel. This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).

Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.

On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1952. Derrida's book reconnects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy and the essays marked under the heading Geschlecht). Derrida reconsiders three other fundamental and recurring elements of Heideggerian philosophy: the distinction between human and animal, technology, and the privilege of questioning as the essence of philosophy.

Of Spirit is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.

Of Spirit was also one of Derrida's first publications on the relationship between philosophy and nationalism, on which he had been teaching in the mid 1980s.

Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.

Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean - Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.

Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy.

Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti - Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."

Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.

In the October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming - a - spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle." Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.^[97]

Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association at least on one occasion in 1988, and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.

In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.

This insistent quarrel (or dispute) was well configured by Umberto Eco when, exposing the example of divergences about the concept of "Denotation" in Stuart Mill and Hjelmslev, concluded that:

the reason for the confusions is not accidental, nor Esperanto full of goodwill will be able to solve it. It is that the semiotic thought presents itself, from the beginning, as always divided by a dilemma and marked by a choice, more or less implicit, that guides the thinker: is it his task when studying languages to know when and how to refer to things properly (problem of truth) or to ask how and when they are used to produce beliefs? Or, downstream of any terminological choice, there is a deeper choice between transparent systems of signification about things or systems of signification as producers of reality. Pathetic confidentiality of this division, the two sides of the fence, when the division is manifested, rate the opponent as idealist (at least in more recent times).

— Umberto Eco, "Signos" in Enciclopédia Einaudi p. 108

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for allegedly misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1998).

Two quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage. The 1972 – 88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.

A sequence of encounters with analytical philosophy is collected in Limited Inc (1988). In 1972, Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context," an essay on J.L. Austin's speech act theory; following a critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long defense of his earlier argument.

Searle exemplified his view on deconstruction in The New York Review of Books, February 2, 1984; for example:

In 1983, Searle told to The New York Review of Books a remark on Derrida allegedly made by Michel Foucault in a private conversation with Searle himself; Derrida later despised Searle's gesture as gossip, and also condemned as violent the use of a mass circulation magazine to fight an academic debate. According to Searle's account, Foucault called Derrida's prose style "terrorist obscurantism"; Searle's quote was:

In 1988, Derrida wrote "Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion", to be published with the previous essays in the collection Limited Inc. Commenting this critics in a footnote he questioned:

In the main text he argued that Searle avoided reading him and didn't try to understand him and even that, perhaps, he was not able to understand, and how certain practices of academic politeness or impoliteness could result in a form of brutality that he disapproved of and would like to disarm, in his fashion.

Much more important in terms of theoretical consequences, Derrida criticized Searle's work for pretending to talk about "intention" without being aware of traditional texts about the subject and without even understanding Husserl's work when talking about it. Because he ignored the tradition he rested blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions.

Derrida would even argue that in a certain way he was more close to Austin, whereas Searle, in fact, was more close to the continental philosophers that Derrida tried to criticize. He would also argument about the problem he found in the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition of which Austin and Searle were only paradigmatic examples.

He continued arguing how problematic it was establishing the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction", defined as its "parasite", for “part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place — and in so doing to "de-essentialize" itself as it were.” He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:

what is "nonfiction standard discourse," what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive "parasitism," is always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)? This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its fictional "parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional.

— Jacques Derrida, Afterword in Limited Inc p. 133f

Derrida has often been the target of attacks by analytic philosophers; an attack of major significance was their 1992 attempt at stopping Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate.

For its historical impact through the centuries, Cambridge was widely recognized as the most influential European University, one that "continues to play a very particular role for the university consciousness in the world," Its decision to confer an honorary degree to Derrida was seen as a challenge to the apparent hegemony of the Anglo - American Analytic philosophy over most of the philosophy departments of the Anglophone world.

There were protesters from within Cambridge philosophy faculty, but mostly the letter signatories were from other institutions from the US and UK, a circumstance that some condemned as an attack to the academic freedom of Cambridge scholars. Eighteen protesters from other institutions, including Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus and René Thom, sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:

In the end the protesters were outnumbered when Cambridge put the motion on a vote. Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."

Interviewed in 1995, Derrida talked about the difficulties of divulgative tasks under limited space and time, when professors and journalists need to explain something difficult without betraying it; Derrida's argument was also a rebuttal of certain charges of obfuscation and obscurantism:

Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non - Nazism". In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterized Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points....

Twenty - four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behavior as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.

Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, in 1976 briefly labeled Derrida's 1967 criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation. In 1991, the dispute with Richard Wolin, which was also conducted and publicized through the mass circulation magazine The New York Review of Books, also included charges of nihilism.

Christopher Wise in his book Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by Robert J.C. Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) and extended in his Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria. In contrast, Wise compares Derrida's thought to precolonial notions of the word that are rooted in ancient Egyptian and African society. Wise argues that Derridean concept of spirit / specter as occult pharmakon is indebted not only to the Hebraic notion of ruah but also the Egyptian heka, Soninke naxamala, Mande nyama, and many other comparable Egypto - African concepts of the word, some that are historically prior to the Hebraic ruah. Wise suggests that Derrida deliberately elides related African concepts of the word in order to accord Judaism a place of special prominence within the history of European philosophy. He argues instead that European philosophy must acknowledge its historical indebtedness to Middle Eastern and African thought, which is not limited to the influence of Judaism alone.

Emir Rodríguez Monegal alleged that many of Derrida's ideas were recycled from the work of Borges (from essays and tales such as "La fruición literaria" (1928), "Elementos de preceptiva" (1933), "Pierre Menard" (1939), "Tlön" (1940), "Kafka y sus precursores" (1951)), opening his article with:

Siempre me ha resultado difícil leer a Derrida. No tanto por la densidad de su pensamiento y el estilo moroso, redundante, repetitivo en que éste aparece desarrollado, sino por una causa completamente circunstancial. Educado en el pensamiento de Borges desde los quince años, muchas de las novedades de Derrida me han parecido algo tautológicas. No podía entender cómo tardaba tanto en llegar a las luminosas perspectivas que Borges había abierto hacía ya tantos años. La famosa "desconstrucción" me impresionaba por su rigor técnico y la infinita seducción de su espejo textual pero me era familiar: la había practicado en Borges avant la lettre.

I have always found Derrida difficult to read. Not so much by the density of the morose, redundant and repetitive thought and style that he seems to have developed, but for an entirely circumstantial reason. Educated in Borges's thought from the age of fifteen, many of Derrida's novelties struck me as somewhat tautological. I could not understand how it took him so long to capture the bright prospects that Borges had opened so many years ago. The famous "deconstruction" impressed me for its technical precision and the infinite seduction of its textual mirror, but I was familiar with it: it had been practiced in Borges avant la lettre.

Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:

• Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École Normale Superieure, he said "I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti - unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally "freed" speech, of restored "transparence," and so forth." During May '68, he met frequently with Maurice Blanchot.
• He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.
• In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the petition against age of consent laws.
• In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean - Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice president.
• In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leading a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled", as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on January 1, 1982.
• He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear war in 1984.
• He was active in cultural activities against the Apartheid government of South Africa and on behalf of Nelson Mandela beginning in 1983.
• He met with Palestinian intellectuals during a 1988 visit to Jerusalem. He was active in the collective "89 for equality", which campaigned for the right of foreigners to vote in local elections.
• He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non - utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu - Jamal.
• Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin’s Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.
• In the 2002 French presidential election he refused to vote in the run-off between far right leader Jean - Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.
• While supportive of the American government in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Rogues and his contribution to Philosophy in a Time of Terror with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas).

Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.

Derrida has sometimes been characterized by the Analytic philosophy tradition as belonging to its 'ancestral antagonist', the Continental philosophy tradition. However, during the Derrida - Searle dispute he wrote:

I sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin [prominent analytic philosopher] than to a certain Continental tradition from which Searle, on the contrary, has inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct. I now have to add this: it is often because "Searle" ignores this tradition or pretends to take no account of it that he rests blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions, not to mention the deconstructive ones. It is because in appearance at least "I" am more of a historian that "I" am a less passive, more attentive and more "deconstructive" heir of that so-called tradition. And hence, perhaps again paradoxically, more foreign to that tradition. I put quotation marks around "Searle" and "I" to mark that beyond these indexes, I am aiming at tendencies, types, styles, or situations rather than at persons.

Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV. In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).

Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi - Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Stéphane Mallarmé.

His book, Adieu a Emanuel Levinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.

Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included Paul de Man, Jean - François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean - Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue - Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean - Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury - Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Samuel Weber and Catherine Malabou.

Jean - Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue - Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.

Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean - Luc Nancy (On Touching — Jean - Luc Nancy, 2005).

Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.

Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the U.S., de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro - Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.

Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.

Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.

In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well - determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text." According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism. Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.

Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of these are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.

Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale - Anne Brault.

Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills were engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, which presents Derrida's seminar from 2001 to 2002, has appeared in English translation; further volumes  projected for the series includeed The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (2002 – 2003), Death Penalty, Volume I (1999 – 2000), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000 – 2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997 – 1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998 – 1999).

With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two - thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."

Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium," of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, techni­cal, and economic adventure of the West."

He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. In a 1982 interview, he said: "I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g., the tape recorder). And this is writing too."

And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said: "As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and “communication of consciousnesses.” We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan’s ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism."