Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (El-Biar, French Algeria, July 15, 1930-Paris, October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher of Algerian origin, popularly known for developing a semiotic analysis known as as deconstruction. He is one of the main figures associated with poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy.

The revolutionary nature of his work has led him to be considered the new Immanuel Kant by the thinker Emmanuel Lévinas, or the new Friedrich Nietzsche according to Richard Rorty. He is, perhaps, the thinker of the end of the century XX that has raised the most controversy, due to its iconoclasm and its critical commitment. Some consider that he achieved the Nietzschean dream of the philosopher-artist.

Biography

He was born into a Sephardic Jewish family, originally from Toledo and affluent middle class. He suffered the repression of the Vichy government and was expelled in October 1942 from his Algerian institute for racist reasons. That trauma, which he would remember his whole life, would help build his personality.

As compensation, as a young man he participated in numerous sports competitions, and dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player. But already at that time he discovered and passionately read not only the classic novelists but also philosophers and writers such as Albert Camus, Antonin Artaud, Paul Valéry, Rousseau, Nietzsche and André Gide.

He went to France. After four years of literary preparatory classes at the Louis the Great Lyceum in Paris, and with nostalgia for his native place, he entered the French Superior Normal School in 1952; there he discovered Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Louis Althusser. He soon became close friends with his tutor Louis Althusser, an affection that lasted for life despite the ideological differences and the latter's tragedy. The latter said that his student was a "giant" of French philosophy. Another of His teachers were Maurice de Gandillac.

Later, he obtained a scholarship to study at Harvard University (later he taught at universities in the United States, mainly Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and New York University). He married in June 1957 Marguerite Aucouturier, a translator and future psychoanalyst (with whom he had two children, Pierre, born in 1963, and Jean, in 1967). Months later he returned to Algeria as a recruit to complete his military service. He applied to be assigned as a teacher in a school for children of soldiers, in Koléa, near Algiers. For more than two years he was a soldier, but without wearing military uniform, and he taught French and French to Algerian and French youth. In the former colony he met the future sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. A severe critic of France's policy in Algeria, he dreamed of a form of independence that would allow Algerians and French to coexist.

In 1959 he taught for the first time at the Le Mans high school. In 1964 she won the Jean Cavaillès Prize for Epistemology for her translation of Edmund Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, with a huge introduction. In 1965, in the shadow of Althusser, he obtained the position of director of studies at the Ecole Normale Superior, in the Philosophy department. He had the support, all his life, of the rigorous historian of science Georges Canguilhem.

His participation, with a group of prominent intellectuals —Jean Hyppolite, Georges Poulet, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Jean-Pierre Vernant or Jacques Lacan—, in a meeting on French human sciences at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), was decisive. His continuous trips to the United States began, where he considered he had greater freedom and where his thinking had a significant influence for life. In 1967 the first three books of him were published. He was an admirer of the work of Maurice Blanchot, to whom he dedicated important texts, and progressively associated with Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Sarah Kofman on various projects, including editorials. Editorial Galilée, from 1971, would become years later not only the "voice" of Deconstruction, and its safe place for his work, but in a select company, which is welcoming great figures of letters (Bonnefoy, Quignard, Cixous, etc.). At the same time, in 1983, he founded the International College of Philosophy. In 1984 he was appointed director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, where he worked for the rest of his life. Well, in the end they prevented him from entering the Collège de France, despite the efforts of Bourdieu or, for example, Bonnefoy. He died on October 8, 2004 in Paris, a victim of pancreatic cancer, never stopping working dizzyingly.

Derrida Tomb in Ris-Orangis

He initially supported the students during the May '68 protests, but with reservations, although he did participate in protests. He expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War, with The Ends of Man that he read in the United States. In 1979 he took the initiative to gather "the General Estates of Philosophy" at the Sorbonne, to defend this discipline, and became increasingly involved in politics, a domain that he had apparently discarded from his professional life but which he occupied for life. In 1981 he founded the Jan Hus association to help dissident Czech intellectuals. In 1981 he was imprisoned in Prague after a clandestine philosophy seminar and the police manipulation of his suitcase (where they introduced drugs), but the protest of intellectuals and Mitterrand managed to free him.

Since then he was more present in French society (despite university reluctance) and even allowed part of his life and his image, previously hidden, to be visible (as in The postcard, from 1986) and gave reason even to his own reflection. In 1995 he belonged to the support committee, with J. P. Vernant, for the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. He was a militant based on rigorous work, oblivious to partisan conjunctures, as is well perceived in his late Spectres of Marx (1993) and Cosmopolitans of all countries, one more effort! (1996).

He participated in cultural activities in favor of Nelson Mandela, whom he later admired for his different political action from Algeria, and against the Apartheid government of South Africa since 1983. He also met with Palestinian intellectuals during his visit to Jerusalem in 1988. He was part of the collective "89 for equality" that campaigned for the right of immigrants to vote in local elections. He protested against the death penalty in the US, devoting the last years of his seminar to producing non-utility arguments for its abolition, and participated in the campaign to free the black American journalist sentenced to death Mumia Abu. -Jamal. After sympathizing with the victims of the September 11 attacks in New York, he doubted that it was a "new and major event" and recalled US war actions, and opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Derrida's thought

Jacques Derrida

The most innovative of his thought is the so-called deconstruction. Deconstruction is a type of thinking that strongly criticizes, analyzes, and revises words and their concepts. The deconstructivist discourse highlights the inability of philosophy to establish a stable base, while still claiming its analytical power. It is worth mentioning that most of Derrida's studies exposed a strong dose of rebellion and criticism of the prevailing social system.

As Derrida himself explained in his «Letter to a Japanese Friend», the word «déconstruction» tried to translate and reappropriate for its own purposes the Heideggerian terms Destruktion and Abbau, which addressed problems of structure and architecture in Western metaphysics; but the French word, classic, has various uses, more consistent with its intentions: in its case it would be a gesture "for" and "against" structuralism, this enters into its problems and its excesses. Deconstruction is related to with vast trajectories of the Western philosophical tradition, although it is also linked to various academic disciplines such as linguistics and anthropology (called «human sciences» in France), with which it argues when it perceives that they do not sufficiently participate in «philosophical demands». The conceptual and historical examination of the philosophical foundations of anthropology, as well as his constant use of philosophical notions (consciously or not), was an important aspect of his thought. Among his most notable influences are Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger.

Derrida had a significant impact on continental European philosophy and literary theory, particularly through his friendly and literary bond with the critic Paul de Man, which would result in a book of his on his death., there is no agreement on the extent to which there is consonance between Derrida's theory and the deconstruction that has developed in literary criticism. Derrida made continuous reference to analytic philosophy in his work, particularly to John Austin, with some critical distance.

Her work is often associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism, but her association with the latter is uncertain. Lyotard is a closer bridge between deconstruction and postmodernism, developing philosophical senses of postmodernism, which Derrida used in lengthy dialogues that do not admit of a clear relationship between the work of the two. Figures considered within the same field of deconstruction have defined themselves as more modernist than postmodernist.

Derrida is a philosopher who arouses unwavering support and no less vigorous detractions. But it is that, interested in philosophy and literature at the same time, he did not renounce "neither one nor the other", and in fact thought "through writing itself and not only within a historical or theoretical reflection", which complicated the outcome of his reflections. In fact, as he stressed before his death, he had been very interested in "leaving traces in the history of the French language."

His first works with an international tone —Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and The Voice and the Phenomenon (all three of 1967)—were heavily criticized, but also greatly admired, and for some his best essays, for which he began teaching in Germany and the US. For their references to John Austin and his theory of language acts, Derrida was accused, above all by John Searle, of persisting in enunciating self-evident counter-truths. In 1992, twenty philosophers signed against him, reproaching him for "his inadequacy of the standards of clarity and rigor", but they did not prevent him from being granted honoris causa by the University of Cambridge (1992), after a vote that achieved 336 votes (against 204). In parallel with analytic philosophy, Derrida was criticized by Chomsky. But he found the largest audience in the United States, which he frequented assiduously, especially in the departments of political science, literature, and cultural studies. His leaving much of his manuscript to the Irvine Library, despite his final ethical conflicts, is a sign of affection for his people.

Maurizio Ferraris has synthesized his figure as a thinker in this way: «The oscillation between idealism (and transcendentalism) on the one hand, and realism, on the other, constitutes a characteristic feature of all Husserlian philosophy, from which Derrida presents himself, Well, as a highly innovative heir; and this explains why, after the initial resistance, his philosophy was gradually occupying such a central space in contemporary philosophy ».

After his death, the publication of his work continues. In 2008 he finally began the vast publication in Galilée of his Seminars , which will span the years at the Sorbonne (1960-1964), at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1964-1984), and finally at EHESS (1984-2003). In 2010, the first and important biography of Benoît Peeters appeared, Derrida, which has already been translated into Spanish and German.

Awards

He was recognized with an honorary doctorate by many universities: after Cambridge, for example in London and in Coimbra. And there were and continue to be numerous colloquies about his work; the last one while he was alive took place in Rio de Janeiro, in August 2004.

• 2001 - Theodor W. Adorno Award for the City of Frankfurt (Germany)

Some writings

Voice and phenomenon (1967)

• The Différance
• The withdrawal of the metaphor
• From the gramatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Voice and phenomenon (1967)
• The Purposes of Man
• The dissemination (1972)
• Margins - of philosophy (1972)
• Spurs. Nietzsche styles (1976)
• About an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy (1983)
• Mémoires pour Paul de Man:
• Postcard: From Freud to Lacan and beyond (1986)
• From the spirit. Heidegger and the question (1987)
• Species of Marx (1993)
• Friendship policies (1994)
• Bad file (1995)
• Cosmopolitas of all countries, one more effort! (four editions 1996)
• The Monolingualism of the other or the prosthesis of origin (1996)
• Goodbye to Emmanuel Lévinas (1997):
• I don't write without artificial light (four 1999 and 2004 editions of Mauritius Jalon)
• Analysis States (2000):
• Tourner les mots (2000; Safaa Fathy)
• University without condition (2001)
• Fichus. Address by Frankfurt (2002):
• Béliers, Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (2003)
• Every time unique, the end of the world, Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2005 (or 2003).
• Apprendre à vivre enfinGalilee, 2005. Learning at last to live, Amorrortu editors, 2006 (1.a reprint).
• Les yeux de langue, L'Herne, 2005, and Galilee, 2011.
• L'animal that donc je suisGalilee, 2006.
• La Bête et le SouverainI, 2008, Seminar.
• La Bête et le Souverain, II, 2009, Seminar, years 2001-03.
• Demeure, AthènesGalilee, 2009.
• Otobiographies, Amorrortu editors, 2009 (or., Otobiographies. L'enseignement de Nietzsche1984 and 2005).
• Passions, Amorrortu editors, 2011 (or. Passions1993.
• Khôrá, Amorrortu editors, 2011 (or, 1993).
• Except the name, Amorrortu editors, 2011 (or., Sauf le nom1993).
• The play, Jean Luc-Nancy, Amorrortu editors, 2011 (or., Le toucher. Jean Luc-Nancy2000).
• Politique et amitiéGalilee, 2011.
• Histoire du mensongeGalilee, 2012
• Excuse me. Unforgivable and unpredictable, Avarigani, 2016
• Limited Inc, Santiago: Pólvora Editorial, 2018. (or, Limited Inc, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1990)

Documentaries and films

• Ghost Dance (1983)
• D'ailleurs, Derrida (1999, led by Safaa Fathy)
• Derrida (2002)