JACQUES DERRIDA

'Jacques Derrida' (IPA: ^[1]) (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon continental philosophy, French philosophy, and literary theory.

Life

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar (near Algiers), then French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family, the third of five children. His given name was Jackie, though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name.^[2] 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. At this time, as well as taking part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player), Derrida read works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Camus, Nietzsche and Gide. He began to think seriously about philosophy around 1948 and 1949. He became a boarding student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which he did not enjoy. Derrida failed his entrance examination twice before finally being admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the end of the 1951–52 school year.
On the first day at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. He also befriended Michel Foucault, whose lectures he attended. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his philosophy ''agrégation'' on Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry." Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and in June 1957 married 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 Derrida began a long association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists. At the same time, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and from 1964 to 1984 at the École Normale Superieure. He completed his ''Thèse d'État'' in 1980; the work was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". His wife Marguerite gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. Beginning with his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," his work assumed international prominence. 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''—which would make his name.
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 travelled 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 1984, Derrida had a third son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski.
In 1986 he became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. The university has a major archive of his manuscripts which the courts have now determined must be returned to the family.^[3] He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and New York University, and The New School for Social Research.
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the 2001 from the University of Frankfurt. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Cambridge University, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, University of Leuven, and Williams College.
In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and traveling engagements. He died in a Parisian hospital on the evening of October 8, 2004.^[4]

Work

Introduction

Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly speaking be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life. 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 precisely the false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks 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?^[5]
In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.^[6] 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.^[7] It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.^[8]
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs 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 that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.^[9]

Early works

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.^[10] In 1962 he published ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'', which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. It can plausibly be argued that with this commentary Derrida had already posed the basis of his whole path of thinking.^[11] 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''."^[12]
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, thus leading to the notion that his thought was a form of post-structuralism. Near the beginning of the essay, Derrida argued:
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.

1967–1972

Derrida's work demonstrated an interest in all the disciplines under discussion at the Baltimore conference, as was evinced by the subject of the three collections of work published in 1967: ''Of Grammatology'', ''Writing and Difference'', and ''Speech and Phenomena''.^[13] These three books contained readings of the work of many philosophers and authors, including Husserl, linguist de Saussure, Heidegger, Rousseau, Lévinas, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Edmond Jabès and Antonin Artaud. The fundamental 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?"^[14] It was in this trinity of works that the "principles" of deconstruction were set out, not through theoretical explication but, rather, by demonstration, where he showed that the arguments promulgated by their subject-matter exceeded and contradicted the oppositional parameters in which they were situated. The next five years of lectures and essay-length work were gathered into two 1972 collections, ''Dissemination'' and ''Margins of Philosophy'', at which time a collection of interviews (published as ''Positions'' in 1981) was also released.

1972–1980

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. He was said to have released more work in 2003 than in any other year. He was so prolific that there is no bibliography of his work that is complete. A good start is the bibliography included in Jack Reynolds' and Jonathan Roffe's (eds.) ''Understanding Derrida'' (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
During the 1970s, his work was arguably at its most playful and most radical: his crucial works ''Glas'', and ''The Post-Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond'' set the tone for his deconstructive project, particularly by emphasizing his form of close reading, his playful treatment of words, and his effort to demonstrate the potential of deconstruction.
A further crucial set of texts from this period is collected in ''Limited, Inc''. Derrida had written "Signature Event Context", an essay on J. L. Austin in the early 1970s; following an aggressive critique of this text by John Searle, Derrida wrote a long (and no less aggressive) defense of his earlier argument, which remains crucial to any understanding of deconstruction's involvement with language and its commonly perceived limitations.

''Of Spirit''

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. But with his Nazi political engagement in 1933, 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 a crucial contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by an 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 noted that Farías was 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.
But ''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. This strand of questions would become increasingly important in his later work.

Political and ethical "turns"

Two further points deserve mention: Derrida's "political turn," heralded by ''Specters of Marx'' and ''Politics of Friendship'' in 1994, saw him divert his attention to politics. Derrida and many of his supporters have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays, though the change of tone and the effort granted to political issues rose.
His "ethical turn," in works such as ''The Gift of Death'', saw Derrida applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida reads Søren Kierkegaard's ''Fear and Trembling''. But much more massive in importance and influence were Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, which came to provide a broad corpus on questions of law, responsibility, friendship, etc. Derrida also influenced the field of anthropology.^[15]
This is not to say that Derrida moved altogether away from his readings of literature; indeed, he continued to write extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

Deconstruction

Main articles: Deconstruction

The 1966 paper, in addition to establishing Derrida's international reputation, marked the start of Derrida's use of the concept of deconstruction. Although Derrida did not completely object to the characterization of his entire project with this one term, it was a development about which he remained ambivalent.
At its core, if it can be said to have one, deconstruction is an attempt to open a text (literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to several meanings and interpretations. Its method is usually based on binary oppositions within a text — for example inside and outside or subject and object, or male and female. 'Deconstruction' then argues that such oppositions are culturally and historically defined, even reliant upon one another, and seeks to demonstrate that they are not as clear-cut or as stable as it would at first seem. On the basis that the two opposed concepts are fluid, this ambiguity is used to show that the text's meaning is fluid as well.
This fluidity stands against a legacy of traditional metaphysics (that is, Platonist thought) founded on oppositions, that seeks to establish a stability of meaning through conceptual absolutes where one term, for example "good," is elevated to a status that designates its opposite, in this case "evil," as its perversion, lack or inferior. These "violent hierarchies," as Derrida termed them, are taken as structurally unstable within the texts themselves, where the meaning strictly depends on this contradiction or antinomy.
Derrida insisted that deconstruction was never performed or executed but "took place" through "memory work": in this way, the task of the "deconstructor" was to show where this oppositional or dialectical stability was ultimately subverted by the text's internal logic. Meticulous readings find philosophy anew. The result of this renewal is often to find striking interpretations of texts. No "meaning" is stable: Derrida called the "metaphysics of presence" the thing that keeps the sense of unity within a text; where presence was granted the privilege of truth.
To understand this argument, one may need to explore Derrida's deconstruction of the speech/writing opposition, of which ''Of Grammatology'' is perhaps the clearest study. Derrida's critique of oppositions may be partly inspired by Nietzsche's genealogical reconsideration of "good" and "evil" (see, in particular, ''Beyond Good and Evil'' and ''On the Genealogy of Morals'').
Derrida's practice of reading raises the question of the relationship between deconstruction and literary theory. Within literary studies, deconstruction is often treated as a particular method of reading — in contrast to Derrida's claims that deconstruction is an "event" within a text, not a method of reading it. Despite this apparent contradiction, the literary sensibilities of Derrida cannot be ignored, as many of his deconstructions were of poems and literary texts.
Further, deconstruction's sensitivities to philosophical efforts at defining limits have been taken by some to imply a deconstructive agenda for the ultimate reversal of order. This agenda would cover: philosophy's claim to be the first of all academic disciplines; holding out hopes of uniting all; delineating what is proper to each as they remain apart; and expelling from itself non-philosophy (via judgements which irreducibly take part in violence and hinge on matters of interpretation made through language). This has been seen as the privilege of the non-serious and the literary over a humbled philosophy.
Although its influence on literary studies is probably the most well-known and well-reported effect of deconstruction, its roots are more philosophical than literary, although it is also tied to distinct but abutting academic disciplines such as linguistics, women's studies, and anthropology (called the "human sciences" in France). Derrida's examination of the latter's philosophical foundations, both conceptual and historical, and their continued reliance on philosophical argument (whether consciously or not), was an important aspect of his thought. Among his foremost influences are Edmund Husserl (just Husserl's earlier works), Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud. Derrida remarked many times his debt with Husserl and Heidegger, and he said that without them he would have not said a single word.^[16] On the major influence of Heidegger, he claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (''Derrida and différance'', eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms ''Destruktion'' and ''Abbau'' via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements.
This relationship with the Heideggerean term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition", as Derrida shared with Heidegger an interest in renovating philosophy to allow it to treat increasingly fundamental matters. In this regard, he moves beyond Heidegger in a significant way. While Heidegger passes through Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides, and finds their work wanting where the question of Being is concerned, Derrida prefers to mine the heterogeneous nature of their works — indeed, his reading of Plato in ''Dissemination'' is among his best-known and most important readings, in which Plato's ''khôra'' is treated.

Criticisms of Derrida's work

A broad overview of the history of Derrida's reception, covering the period until the publication of ''Specters of Marx'' (1994), is given in ''The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation'' (2006).

Lack of philosophical rigour

Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on several occasions and was highly regarded by contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas,^[17] and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by others, such as René Thom and W. V. Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry. John Searle, a frequent critic of Derrida dating back to their exchange on speech act theory in ''Limited Inc'' (where Derrida strongly accused Searle of intentionally misreading and misrepresenting him), exemplified this view in his comments on deconstruction in the ''New York Review of Books'', February 2, 1994 [1], for example:
An instance of controversy surrounding Derrida's work and its legitimacy arose when the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate, despite opposition from members of its philosophy faculty and a letter of protest signed by eighteen professors from other institutions, including W. V. Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom. In their letter they claimed that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and described Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter also stated that "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."^[18]

Intentional obfuscation

Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida uses "pretentious rhetoric" to obscure the simplicity of his ideas. He groups Derrida within a broader category of the Parisian intellectual community which he has criticized for, on his view, acting as an elite power structure for the well educated through "difficult writing" and obscurantism. Chomsky has indicated that he may simply be incapable of understanding Derrida, but he is suspicious of this possibility.
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in ''The New York Times'' ("Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74") and ''The Economist''[3]. Both of these obituaries were criticised by academics supportive of Derrida; other obituaries were less critical.
In ''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. According to Rorty, this technique precludes any metaphysical accounts of Derrida's work. And since his work itself ostensibly contains no metaphysics, Derrida has consequently escaped metaphysics altogether.
Rorty, Richard. ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida"

Charges of nihilism

Some critics charge that the deconstructive project is "nihilistic". They claim Derrida's writing attempts to undermine the ethical and intellectual norms vital to the academy, if not Western civilization itself. Derrida is accused of creating a blend of extreme skepticism and solipsism that effectively denies the possibility of knowledge and meaning, which these critics believe is harmful.
Derrida, however, felt that deconstruction was enlivening, productive, and affirmative, and that it does not "undermine" norms but rather places them within contexts that reveal their developmental and effective features.
Perhaps most persistent among these critics is Richard Wolin, who has argued that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Lévinas, 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" ^[19]. 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 characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. [4], [5]. Derrida in turn responded, in somewhat acerbic fashion, 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...''.

Politics

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

★ He was initially supportive of Parisian student protesters during the May 1968 protests, but later withdrew.

★ He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.

★ In 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leaving a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs" 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, returning to Paris on January 2, 1982.

★ 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 (by then the stepfather of Daniel, his son with Sylviane Agacinski) 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 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (See ''Rogues'' and his contribution to ''Philosophy in a Time of Terror'' with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas).
Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, the political, particularly the idea of the nation, was continually central to his philosophy. Derrida noted in "The Ends of Man" (in ''Margins of Philosophy'') that his ability to remark freely on the Vietnam War was a prerequisite to his attendance at American colloquia — an exception underscoring the national rule. He insisted on this because the ''democratic form'' (Derrida's emphasis and choice of words) of the colloquial event assumed an instability of these national identities, or rather non-identities, and because he wished to assert solidarity with those Americans opposed to the war.
Moreover, in his later years, Derrida amplified the political character of earlier philosophical arguments. Derrida and many of his readers have insisted that a distinct political undertone pervades his texts since 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. In some ways, Derrida turned the ethical thought of Emmanuel Lévinas toward a more distinctly political questioning. By 2000 theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.

Derrida and his peers

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, Geoffrey Bennington, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

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).

Paul de Man

Main articles: Paul de Man

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". "Like the Sound..." became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered that long before his academic career in the US, 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's essay is a defense of de Man. Derrida argues, in the main, that one cannot define all of de Man's work in light of a few newspaper articles written in de Man's early twenties. Rather, any claims about de Man's work are to be considered in light of the entire body of his scholarship. The most controversial portion of the article is a relatively short section of analysis where Derrida deconstructs de Man's essays, suggesting alternative meanings to various phrases and propositions. Critics have read this section of the essay as a weak attempt to minimize the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. This "deconstruction" of de Man's work led to a flurry of responses that, along with Derrida's own reply, nearly filled a subsequent issue of ''Critical Inquiry''. What makes this controversy more unusual is that in other contexts Derrida spoke out strongly 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 translators

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.
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."

Relationships and mourning

Derrida's relationship with many of his contemporaries was marked by disagreements and rifts. For example, Derrida's criticism of Foucault in the essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (from ''Writing and Difference''), first given as a lecture which Foucault attended, caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended. Others, like Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, found in his critical engagement with their work an invitation for further discussion.
Whatever the outcome of these discussions, Derrida was often left in the unappealing position of having an opportunity for the last word in too many, as he outlived many of his peers. Death and mourning are foundational to the analysis which lead Derrida to his understanding of inheritance, interpretation, and responsibility. 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'', which was expanded in the 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.

Bibliography

An extensive online bibliography can be found at this site. The compilation, copyrighted by Peter Krapp, is still in progress, but all major works are listed, sorted by title or by year of publication.
See also: Jacques Derrida Bibliography.

Selected translations

★ ''“Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs'', trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

★ ''Of Grammatology'', trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) (hardcover: ISBN 0-8018-1841-9, paperback: ISBN 0-8018-1879-6, corrected edition: ISBN 0-8018-5830-5).

★ ''Writing and Difference'', trans. Alan Bass (London & New York: Routledge, 1978).

★ ''Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles'', trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

★ ''The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac'', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

★ ''Dissemination'', trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1981).

★ ''Positions'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981) [Paris, Minuit, 1972].

★ ''Margins of Philosophy'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1982).

★ ''Signsponge'', trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

★ ''The Ear of the Other'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

★ ''Glas'', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. & Richard Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

★ ''Memoires for Paul de Man'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; revised edn., 1989).

★ ''The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

★ ''The Truth in Painting'', trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Ian McLeod (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1987).

★ ''Limited Inc'' (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

★ ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

★ ''Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question'', trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

★ ''Cinders'', trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

★ ''Acts of Literature'' (New York & London: Routledge, 1992).

★ ''Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

★ ''The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).

★ ''Aporias'', trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

★ ''Jacques Derrida'', co-author & trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993).

★ ''Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

★ ''Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994).

★ ''Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression'', trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

★ ''The Gift of Death'', trans. David Wills (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

★ ''On the Name'', trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., & Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

★ ''Points...: Interviews 1974-1994'', trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

★ ''Chora L Works'', with Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli, 1997).

★ ''Politics of Friendship'', trans. George Collins (London & New York: Verso, 1997).

★ ''Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin'', trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

★ ''Resistances of Psychoanalysis'', trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

★ ''The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud'', with Paule Thévenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 1998).

★ ''Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

★ ''Rights of Inspection'', trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli, 1999).

★ ''Demeure: Fiction and Testimony'', with Maurice Blanchot, ''The Instant of My Death'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

★ ''Of Hospitality'', trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

★ ''Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars'' (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001).

★ ''On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness'', trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

★ ''A Taste for the Secret'', with , trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).

★ ''The Work of Mourning'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2001).

★ ''Acts of Religion'' (New York & London: Routledge, 2002).

★ ''Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews'', with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

★ ''Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy'', trans Peter Pericles Trifonas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

★ ''Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

★ ''Who's Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1'', trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

★ ''Without Alibi'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

★ ''Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida'', with Jürgen Habermas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

★ ''The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy'', trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2003).

★ ''Counterpath'', with Catherine Malabou, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

★ ''Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2'', trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

★ ''For What Tomorrow...: A Dialogue'', with Elisabeth Roudinesco, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

★ ''Rogues: Two Essays on Reason'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

★ ''On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy'', trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

★ ''Paper Machine'', trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

★ ''Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan'', trans. Thomas Dutoit (Fordham University Press, 2005).

★ ''H. C. for Life: That Is to Say...'', trans. Laurent Milesi & Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

★ ''Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, And Genius: The Secrets of the Archive'', trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

★ ''Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview'', with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Melville House, 2007).

★ ''Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Works on Derrida

★ Richard Beardsworth, ''Derrida and the Political,'' (ISBN 0-415-10967-1)

★ Geoffrey Bennington, ''Legislations'' (ISBN 0-86091-668-5)

★ Geoffrey Bennington, ''Interrupting Derrida'' (ISBN 0-415-22427-6)

★ Rodolphe Gasché, ''Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida''

★ Rodolphe Gasché, ''The Tain of the Mirror''

★ Chantal Mouffe (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Pragmatism'', with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida

★ Christopher Norris, ''Derrida'' (ISBN 0-674-19823-9)

★ Herman Rapaport, ''Later Derrida'' (ISBN 0-415-94269-1)

★ John Sallis (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Philosophy'', with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida

★ 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'' (ISBN 0-521-62565-3)

★ David Wood (ed.), ''Derrida: A Critical Reader''

References

1. Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, accessed August 2, 2007.
2. Obituary in ''The Guardian'', accessed August 2, 2007.
3. "The Chronicle of Higher Education", July 20, 2007, accessed August 1, 2007.
4. Deconstruction icon Derrida dies, accessed August 2, 2007.
5. Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in ''Writing 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:

6. 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 in ''Writing and Difference'', and see below), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):
Between the two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.
7. Cf., Derrida, ''Positions'' (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 95–6:
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, '' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
8. On this destabilisation of both "genesis" and "structure," cf., Rodolphe Gasché, ''The Tain of the Mirror'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:
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 in ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'' (1962).
9. Cf., Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in John Sallis (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Philosophy'' (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:

10. 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).
11. Carlo Sini (University of Milan, cattedra di Filosofia Teoretica), 2002, ''La Differance di Derrida'', conference "La fenomenologia e il destino dell'Europa e dell'Occidente" at ''Vacances de l'Esprit''.
12. ''Positions'' p. 5.
13. In ''Positions'' (Eng. 1981, pp. 4-5) Derrida said "[''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."
14. ''Positions'' [1972] p. 5.
15. Lewis, Herbert S. (1998) ''The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and its Consequences'' ''American Anthropologist'' 100:" 716-731
16. See interviews collected in ''Positions'' (Eng. 1981)
17. "Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida," The New Republic 197:14 (October 5, 1987)
18. Barry Smith et al., "Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University," ''The Times'' [London], May 9, 1992. [2]
19. 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. ISBN 0-262-73101-0

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