Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics considerSpeech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work, while others citeOf Grammatology (1967),Writing and Difference (1967), andMargins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements.[25] He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial.[25][26]
Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in a summer home inEl Biar (Algiers), Algeria,[5] to Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (known as "Aimé") Derrida (1896–1970), who worked all his life for the wine and spirits company Tachet, including as a travelling salesman (his son reflected the job was "exhausting" and "humiliating", his father forced him to be a "docile employee" to the extent of waking early to do the accounts at the dining-room table),[27] and Georgette Sultana Esther (1901–1991),[28] daughter of Moïse Safar.[29] His family wasSephardic Jewish (originally fromToledo) and became French in 1870 when theCrémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria.[30][31] His parents named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actorJackie Coogan, who had become well known around the world via his role in the 1921Charlie Chaplin filmThe Kid.[32][33][34] He was also given the middle nameÉlie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at hiscircumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name".[35]
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, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother.[32] Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.
On the first day of the school year in 1942,French administrators in Algeria—implementingantisemitism quotas set by theVichy government—expelled Derrida from hislycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerousfootball competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such asRousseau,Nietzsche, andGide) an instrument of revolt against family and society.[36] His reading also includedCamus andSartre.[36]
During theAlgerian 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.[citation needed] Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at theSorbonne, where he was an assistant ofSuzanne Bachelard (daughter ofGaston Bachelard),Georges Canguilhem,Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the termhermeneutics of suspicion), andJean Wahl.[41] His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child,Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation ofLouis Althusser andJean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984.[42][43] In 1965 Derrida began an association with theTel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.[43] Derrida's subsequent distance from theTel Quel group, after 1971, was connected to his reservations about their embrace ofMaoism and of the ChineseCultural Revolution.[44]
In 1980, he received his firsthonorary doctorate (fromColumbia University) and was awarded hisState doctorate (doctorat d'État) by submitting to theUniversity of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title "L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture" ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing").[37][46] The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draftdoctoral thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction ofJean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object"[46] ("L'idéalité de l'objet littéraire");[47] his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated withKen McMullen on the filmGhost 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 (directeur d'études [fr]) at theÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983).[46] WithFrançois Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded theCollège international de philosophie (CIPH; 'International college of philosophy'), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.[48]
On 8 May 1985, Derrida was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Class IV – Humanities, Section 3 -Criticism and Philology.[49]
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at theUniversity of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. When Derrida's colleague, Dragan Kujundzic, was accused of sexual assault, Derrida wrote a letter to then-Chancellor Cicerone saying "if the scandalous procedure" against Kujundzic was not "interrupted or cancelled," he would end all his "relations with UCI." Regarding his archival papers, there would be "another consequence: since I never take back what I have given, my papers would of course remain the property of UCI and the Special Collections department of the library. However, it goes without saying that the spirit in which I contributed to the constitution of these archives (which is still underway and growing every year) would have been seriously damaged. Without renouncing my commitments, I would regret having made them and would reduce their fulfillment to the barest minimum."[50] After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt 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.[51]
Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers includingQuine,Marcus, andArmstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards 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".[53]
Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries,D'ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida's Elsewhere) bySafaa Fathy (1999),[54] andDerrida byKirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).[55]
Derrida was diagnosed withpancreatic cancer in 2002.[26] He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of 9 October 2004.[58][25][59]
At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer toUniversity of Heidelberg as holder of theGadamer professorship,[60] whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg at 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."[60]
Derrida referred to himself as a historian.[61][62] He questioned assumptions of theWestern philosophical tradition and also more broadlyWestern culture.[63] By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted todemocratize the university scene and to politicize it.[64] Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions ofWestern culture "deconstruction".[63] On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit ofMarxism.[65][66]
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models[jargon] to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism", Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from the conception of speech's relation to writing to the understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics".
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by thesemiology ofFerdinand de Saussure.[67][68] Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers ofstructuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.[69]
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion,[67] which appears in an essay onRousseau in his bookOf Grammatology (1967),[70] is the statement that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).[70] Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.[71][72][73][74][75] 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."[71][76]
Derrida began his career examining the limits ofphenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for hisdiplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work ofEdmund Husserl.[77] Gary Banham has said that the dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation."[78] In 1962 he publishedEdmund 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 inPositions (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) ofSpeech and Phenomena.
Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered atJohns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included inWriting and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned withstructuralism, 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;[80] this has led US academics to label his thought as a form ofpost-structuralism.[9][10][81]
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 becomeThe Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he metPaul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalystJacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida had 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 ofstructuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to thephenomenology approach, the latter having been 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 sincePlato 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.[82] 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.[83]
In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, bealready structured, in order to be the genesisof something?[84] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[85] 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 original complexity must not be understood as an originalpositing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[86][87] 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".[88]
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 theaporias 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.[89]
On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt toHusserl andHeidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.[91][92] 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?"[90] In another essay inWriting and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerge: the Other as opposed to the Same[93] "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to somethingtout autre, "wholly other", beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."[94] Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger andLevinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguistSaussure,[95]Hegel,[96]Foucault,[97]Bataille,[96]Descartes,[97] anthropologistLévi-Strauss,[98][99] paleontologistLeroi-Gourhan,[100] psychoanalystFreud,[101] and writers such asJabès[102] andArtaud.[103]
This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of theWestern 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 aslogocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise isessentially logocentric,[104] and that this is aparadigm inherited from Judaism andHellenism.[105] He in turn describes logocentrism asphallocratic,patriarchal andmasculinist.[105][106] Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices inWestern culture",[105] arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such assacred/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."[104] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies asdeconstruction of Western culture.[107]
In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journalTel Quel.[108][109] This essay was later collected inDissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collectionMargins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitledPositions.
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 theAmerican culture wars,conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,[63] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.[104][110][111]
On 14 March 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference entitled "Heidegger: Open Questions", a lecture which was published in October 1987 asOf Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role ofGeist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.[112] 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 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?"[113] His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" inMargins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English asGeschlecht andGeschlecht II).[114] He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of thisGeflecht [braid]": "the question of the question", "the essence of technology", "the discourse of animality", and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order."[115]
Of Spirit contributes to the longdebate 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 theNaziSturmabteilung (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.[116]
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a political and ethical "turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn includeForce of Law (1990), as well asSpecters of Marx (1994) andPolitics of Friendship (1994). Some refer toThe 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 onAbraham and theSacrifice of Isaac,[117][118] and fromSøren Kierkegaard'sFear and Trembling.
Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this.[122][123][124]
Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published asAdieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida usedBracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.[125][irrelevant citation]
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively onMaurice Blanchot,Paul Celan, and others.
In 1991 he publishedThe Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept ofidentity (as incultural identity,European identity, andnational 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."[126]
At the 1997Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitledThe Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.[127]
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 intoThe Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition,Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, "Unique each time, the end of the world"), to include essays dedicated toGérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the filmDerrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close toGuy 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."[128] Among the places in which Derrida mentions theSpectacle, is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.[129]
Derrida engaged with a variety of political issues, movements, and debates throughout his career. In 1968, he participated in theMay 68 protests in France [and met frequently withMaurice Blanchot]?.[130] However, he expressed concerns about the "cult of spontaneity" and anti-unionist euphoria that he observed.[131] He also registered his objections to theVietnam War in a lecture he gave in the United States. Derrida signed apetition against age of consent laws in 1977,[132] and in 1981 he founded the French Jan Hus association to support dissident Czech intellectuals.[133]
Although Derrida was not associated with any political party until 1995, he supported the Socialist candidacy ofLionel Jospin, despite misgivings about such organizations.[136] In the2002 French presidential election, he refused to vote in therun-off election betweenfar-right candidateJean-Marie Le Pen andcenter-rightJacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.[137] Derrida opposed the2003 invasion of Iraq and was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself within and beyond philosophy. He focused on understanding the political implications of notions such as responsibility, reason of state, decision, sovereignty, and democracy. By 2000, he was theorizing "democracy to come" and thinking about the limitations of existing democracies.[citation needed]
Crucial readings in his adolescence wereRousseau'sReveries of a Solitary Walker andConfessions,André Gide's journal,La porte étroite,Les nourritures terrestres andThe Immoralist;[36] and the works ofFriedrich Nietzsche.[36] The phraseFamilies, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide'sLes nourritures terrestres, book IV.[138] 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 he'll find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).[139]
His book,Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of theFace, which commanded human response.[141] The use of deconstruction to read Jewish texts – like theTalmud – is relatively rare but has recently been attempted.[142]
Jean-Luc Nancy andPhilippe 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 a 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 atJohns 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 wrote the bookMemoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journalCritical 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 US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during theGerman occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitlyantisemitic.
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 discipleJean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him,Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.
Derrida's criticism ofFoucault appears in the essayCogito and the History of Madness (fromWriting and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on 4 March 1963, at a conference atWahl'sCollège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.[42]
In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of hisHistory 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."[143] According to historianCarlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have writtenThe Order of Things (1966) andThe Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.[144] Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism inCogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.[144]
Geoffrey Bennington,Avital Ronell andSamuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often 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 ofOf Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition.Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida'sDissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington andPeggy 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, andDavid Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.[145] Volumes I and II ofThe Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from 12 December 2001 to 27 March 2002 and from 11 December 2002 to 26 March 2003), as well asThe Death Penalty, Volume I (covering 8 December 1999 to 22 March 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series includeHeidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964–1965),Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001),Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), andPerjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).[146]
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published asJacques 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."[147]
Derrida was familiar with the work ofMarshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology,Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium,"[148] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."[149]
He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what he called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.[150] 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.[151]
And in his 1972 essaySignature 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 calledlogocentrism.[152]
Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architectsPeter Eisenman andBernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman inChora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman.[153] This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for theParc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of thekhôra. Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion ofkhôra (χώρα) as set in theTimaeus (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architectNader El-Bizri within the domain ofphenomenology.
Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly takingkhôra to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings.[154] El-Bizri's reflections onkhôra are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations ondwelling and onbeing and space inHeidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved inarchitectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking),[155] and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics.[156] This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on "χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking[157][158][159]Derrida argued that thesubjectile is like Plato'skhôra, Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes thatkhôra rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida,khôra defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed".
In a paper entitledGhostwriting,[160]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida'sDe la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx.[how?][161] Commenting on Derrida'sSpecters of Marx,Terry Eagleton wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody."[162]
Someanalytic 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 otherhumanities disciplines.[104][110]
In his 1989Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book,The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, one section of which is an experiment in fiction) 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.[166]
Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."[167]
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style,Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted."[168]
Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.
In 1992 some academics atCambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of PhilosophyHugh Mellor. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and British institutions, includingBarry Smith,Willard Van Orman Quine,David Armstrong,Ruth Barcan Marcus, andRené Thom, then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of theDadaists". The letter concluded that:
... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. 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.[170]
In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot;[171] though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty.[172] Hugh Mellor continued to find the award undeserved, explaining: "He is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad".[173]
Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the 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". To answer a question about the "exceptional violence", the compulsive "ferocity", and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks", he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult that philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate".[174]
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 corrosivenihilism. 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".[175]
In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition ofThe 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 ofThe 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 the Heideggerian scholarThomas Sheehan that appeared inThe New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.[176] 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 bookPoints....[177]
Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed toThe New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.[178]
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published inThe New York Times,[25]The Economist,[179] andThe Independent.[180] The magazineThe Nation responded to theNew York Times obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic".[63][181] A second obituary by deconstruction scholar and Derrida's friendMark C. Taylor was published by theTimes a few days after the first one.[182]
^John D. Caputo,Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project,OCLC729013297, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 5: "Derrida is the turning point for radical hermeneutics, the point where hermeneutics is pushed to the brink. Radical hermeneutics situates itself in the space which is opened up by the exchange between Heidegger and Derrida..."
^Horner, Robyn (2005).Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction. Burlington: Ashgate. p. 3.
Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home. [...] The boy's main forename was probably chosen because of Jackie Coogan ... When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
See alsoBennington, Geoffrey (1993).Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 325.
1930 Birth of Jackie Derrida, July 15, in El-Biar (near Algiers, in a holiday house).
^Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance By Dawne McCance. Equinox. p. 7.
^Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Politics of Pedagogy (Counterpoints Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education). Peter Lang Publishing Inc. p. 134.OCLC314727596,476972726,263497930,783449163
^abBensmaïa, Réda, "Poststructuralism", in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93.
^Vincent B. LeitchPostmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 27.
^Augustine and Postmodernism, in response to George Heffernan ofMerrimack College. Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-34507-3 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21731-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) page 42:
If I missed, and I probably missed a number of things in your intervention, if I missed something essential please forgive me. First, I would protest against the word postmodernity. I never used this word. I’m not responsible for the use of this word here or anywhere else ...
^Derrida, Jacques (1992)."Force of Law". In Drucilla Cornell; Michael Rosenfeld;Carlson, David Gray (eds.).Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Translated by Mary Quaintance (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. pp. 3–67.ISBN978-0810103979.
A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process (...) deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision.
^"The sociolinguistics of schooling: the relevance of Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin", Michael Evans, 01/2012;ISBN978-3-0343-1009-3. In Edith Esch and Martin Solly (eds.),The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts, Peter Lang, pp. 31–46.
^E.g. "The return of the real", Hal Foster, October – MIT Press (1996); "Kant after Duchamp", Thierry de Duve, October – MIT Press (1996); "Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry – Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975", Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October – MIT Press (2000); "Perpetual Inventory", Rosalind E. Krauss, October – MIT Press, 2010.
^abcdLawlor, Leonard."Jacques Derrida".Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu. 22 November 2006; last modified 6 October 2016. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
I took part in the extraordinary transformation of the Algerian Jews; my great-grandparents were by language, custom, etc., still identified with Arabic culture. After the Cremieux Decree (1870), at the end of the 19th c., the following generation became bourgeois.
When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
See alsoDerrida, Jacques (1993). "Circumfession".Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 96.
'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written (12-23-76)' the name of the prophet Élie, Elijah in English ... so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou Derrida ...
^abcdDerrida (1989)This Strange Institution Called Literature, pp. 35, 38–9.
^abcdAlan D. Schrift (2006)Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 120.
^Marc Goldschmidt,Jacques Derrida : une introduction, 2003, p. 231.
^Brennan, Eugene (2017). "Pourquoi la guerre aujourd'hui? by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida (review)".French Studies: A Quarterly Review.71 (3): 449.doi:10.1093/fs/knx092.Project MUSE666299.
^Derrida (1989)This Strange Institution Called Literature, p. 54:
Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [...] Deconstruction calls for a highly "historian's" attitude (Of Grammatology, for example, is a history book through and through).
I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration, but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place, the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere there is a relation to another thing or relation to another. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.
^Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916) [trans. 1959].Course in General Linguistics. New York: New York Philosophical Library. pp. 121–22. Archived fromthe original on 31 July 2019. Retrieved10 December 2011.
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.
^abDerrida (1967)Of Grammatology, Part II: "Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title "The Exorbitant. Question of Method", pp. 158–59, 163.
^Glendinning, Simon (2011).Jacques Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
^The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title "Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl". English translation:The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (2003).
^J. Derrida (1967), interview with Henri Ronse, p. 5.
^Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," inWriting and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 278.
... 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 centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history ofmetaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of thesemetaphors andmetonymies. Its matrix ... is the determination ofBeing aspresence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre 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" inWriting and Difference, p. 353.
^Smith, David Woodruff (2018),"Phenomenology", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.),The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved20 June 2021
^Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," inWriting and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.),Genèse et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:
All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: "What does the notion of genesisin general, on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structurein general, on whose basis Husserloperates and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between Genesis and structurein general?" is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.
^If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (also inWriting and Difference), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.
Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.
^Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp. 77–8:
If the alterity of the other isposed, that is,only posed, does it not amount tothe same, for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the otherinscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position isof itself confounded (différance): inscription, mark, text and not onlythesis or theme-inscription of thethesis.
^On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf.Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.)Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler,Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998).
^It is opposed to the concept of original purity, which destabilises the thought of both "genesis" and "structure", cf.Rodolphe Gasché,The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:
It is an opening that is structural or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.
And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why différance is a matter not only of difference, but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises inEdmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962).
^Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," inJohn Sallis (ed.),Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:
One of the more persistent misunderstandings that have thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity... Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to "account," in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even thesuccessful development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.
^abDerrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp. 4–5:
[Speech and Phenomena] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless, I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works.Of Grammatology refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture,Speech... would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.
^abDerrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8.
^abOn the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (Derrida and différance, eds.Robert Bernasconi andDavid Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian termsDestruktion andAbbau, via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy.
^Derrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97–192.
^abSven Ove Hansson (2006)."Philosophical Schools". Editorial.Theoria.72. Part 1. Archived fromthe original on 18 July 2006. Retrieved24 February 2008.
[He] chose to address the American Philosophical Association on the topic of Aristotle's theory of friendship ("Journal of Philosophy" 85 (1988), 632–44); Barbara Johnson's "A World of Difference" (Baltimore, 1987) argues that Deconstruction can make valuable ethical and social contributions; and in general there seems to be a return to the ethical and practical...
^Rorty, R. (1995). Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy. Revue internationale de philosophie, 49(194 (4), 437–459.
^Rorty, R. (1989). "Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?".The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2(2), 207.
^McCumber, J. (2000). Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault. Indiana University Press.
^B. L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas, "Que dirait Eurydice?" / "What would Eurydice Say?" (1991–93). Reprinted to coincide with Kabinet exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. This is a reprint ofLe féminin est cette différence inouïe (Livre d'artiste, 1994, and it includes the text ofTime is the Breath of the Spirit, MOMA, Oxford, 1993). Reprinted inAthena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
'French law recognises in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,' said a second petition signed by Sartre and De Beauvoir, along with fellow intellectuals Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida; a leading child psychologist, Françoise Dolto; and writers Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Louis Aragon. 'But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned. It should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose.'
^Jacques Derrida, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,"Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 70–71.
^Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)". Diacritics, 1984.
^Jacques Derrida (2008)."Chapter 10: Marx & Sons". In Sprinker, Michael (ed.).Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx". London: Verso. p. 223.ISBN9781844672110.
^Terry Eagleton (2008)."Chapter 5: Marxism without Marx". In Sprinker, Michael (ed.).Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx". London: Verso. pp. 83–87.ISBN9781844672110.
^Rorty, Richard.Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.ISBN0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida".
^Chomsky, Noam (August 2012)."Postmodernism?".ZCommunications. Retrieved27 September 2014.
^Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
^Barry Smith et al., "Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University,"The Times [London], 9 May 1992[2].
^Richmond, Sarah (April 1996). "Derrida and Analytical Philosophy: Speech Acts and their Force".European Journal of Philosophy.4 (1):38–62.doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.1996.tb00064.x.
If it were only a question of "my" work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can't be limited to a personal "oeuvre," nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work.
If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene. ...
In short, to answer your question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," I would say that these critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate.
^Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin (ed.)The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p. xiii.ISBN0-262-73101-0.
Caputo, John D. (ed.) (1997).Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. Transcript (which is also availablehere at theWayback Machine (archived 1 September 2006)) of the Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida atVillanova University, 3 October 1994. With commentary by Caputo.
Derrida (1988).Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, published in the English translation ofLimited Inc.
Derrida (1989).This Strange Institution Called Literature, interview published inActs of Literature (1991), pp. 33–75
Derrida (1990).Once Again from the Top: Of the Right to Philosophy, interview with Robert Maggiori forLibération, 15 November 1990, republished inPoints...: Interviews, 1974–1994 (1995).
Derrida (1991). "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking", interview with Francois Ewald forLe Magazine Litteraire, March 1991, republished inPoints...: Interviews, 1974–1994 (1995).
Derrida (1992). Derrida's interview inThe Cambridge Review 113, October 1992. Reprinted inPoints...: Interviews, 1974–1994 Stanford University Press (1995) and retitled asHonoris Causa: "This isalso extremely funny," pp. 399–421.Excerpt.
Derrida and Ferraris (1997). "I Have a Taste for Secret", 1993–1995 conversations withMaurizio Ferraris and Giorgio Vattimo, in Derrida and Ferraris (2001)A Taste for the Secret, translated by Giacomo Donis.
Derrida (1997): interviewLes Intellectuels: tentative de définition par eux-mêmes. Enquête, published in a special number of journalLignes, 32 (1997): 57–68, republished inPapier MachineArchived 17 June 2021 at theWayback Machine (2001), and translated into English asIntellectuals. Attempt at Definition by Themselves. Survey, in Derrida (2005)Paper machine.
Derrida (2002): Q&A session atFilm Forum, New York City, 23 October 2002, transcript by Gil Kofman. Published in Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Jacques Derrida (2005).Derrida: screenplay and essays on the film.
Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben,Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205–19.
de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man,Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102–41.
Foucault, Michel, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault,History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550–74.
Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre,Derrida-Bergson. Sur l'immédiateté,Hermann, Paris, coll. "Hermann Philosophie", 2014.ISBN9782705688318
Goldschmit, Marc,Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006.ISBN2-84938-058-X
Habermas, Jürgen, "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas,The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161–84.
Hägglund, Martin,Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Hamacher, Werner,Lingua amissa, Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila editores, 2012.
Llewelyn, John,Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, London: Macmillan, 1986.
Llewelyn, John,Appositions – of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Llewelyn, John,Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Mackey, Louis, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology," inAnglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3, July 1983. 255–272.
Mackey, Louis, "A Nicer Knowledge of Belief" in Louis Mackey,An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature, Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219–240 (ISBN978-0761822677).
Magliola, Robert,Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
Magliola, Robert,On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
Park, Jin Y., ed.,Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN978-0-7425-3418-6;ISBN0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
Rorty, Richard, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121–37.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth,Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
Sprinker, Michael, ed.Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.),Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN0-521-62565-3).
Wood, David (ed.),Derrida: A Critical Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
