Jacques Derrida

Derrida was born in French Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family. In 1942 the Vichy government's antisemitic laws had him expelled from school, an experience that left him uneasy with belonging all his life. He came to Paris in 1949, failed the entrance examination twice, and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1952 under Althusser and Foucault, passing the agrégation in 1956, spending a year at Harvard and teaching in the army during the Algerian war. In 1962 his translation and commentary on Husserl's Origin of Geometry won the Jean Cavaillès prize.

At the Johns Hopkins structuralism conference of 1966 he delivered 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', declaring that the very concept of 'centre' in structuralism needed questioning, and American academia discovered him. In 1967 he published three books at once: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference. Their central claim: from Plato to Husserl, Western thought has treated speech as immediately present meaning and writing as a derivative, dangerous supplement, yet this 'logocentrism' depends on what it devalues; meaning is never present but constituted by difference and infinitely deferred, a movement of differing and deferring he named 'différance'.

Deconstruction is not destruction but the finding, within a text, of tensions the text cannot control, letting the suppressed term return to overturn the hierarchy. Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy and Positions (1972) continued the work, after which his writing grew ever more experimental: Glas prints Hegel and Genet in parallel columns, The Post Card discusses Freud and Heidegger in the form of love letters. He taught at the École Normale for twenty years, received a regular post at the École des Hautes Études only in 1983, and taught at Yale and the University of California at Irvine, his influence far greater in America than in France.

From the 1980s he turned to ethics and politics: justice, the gift, forgiveness, hospitality, friendship, the death penalty, animals, the spectres of Marx, Europe, the future of democracy. He opposed apartheid, was arrested in Prague in 1981 for supporting dissident intellectuals, and when Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1992 a public protest called his work 'semi-intelligible attacks'. He wrote over seventy books. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2004; in his last interview he said 'I never learned to live', and that to learn to live is to learn to die. His influence spans literary theory, law, architecture, theology and political philosophy.