Introducing Derrida

IT’S NECESSARY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE FATE OF THE WORD “DECONSTRUCTION”, AND OTHER THINGS THAT ARE ABLE TO DEVELOP AS DECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT THE NAME THE WORD WILL NOT BE USED INDEFINITELY. IT WILL WEAR ITSELF OUT. BUT BEYOND THE WORD, THIS MIGHT TAKE A LITTLE LONGER…

So Derrida writes “philosophy” in something like “literary” ways. That’s one reason for the anxieties at Cambridge. Derrida’s critique of philosophy puts boundaries between philosophy and literature into question.
Derrida has destabilized other boundaries. He’s taken his way of doing philosophy into art, architecture, law and politics. He’s engaged with nuclear disarmament, racism, apartheid, feminist politics, the question of national identities, and other issues – including the authority of teaching institutions.
The profile of a joker? Perhaps, if we’re willing to re-think joking …
“Jacques Derrida”
By the time of the Cambridge dispute, Jacques Derrida’s institutional credentials were internationally acknowledged.
Derrida was born in Algeria in 1930 to a lower middle-class, Sephardic Jewish family.
He studied philosophy in Paris with the Marx and Hegel scholar, Jean Hyppolite, at the École Normale Supérieure (1952-6). His work on phenomenology was quickly recognized: a scholarship to Harvard in 1956, the Prix Cavaillès in 1962.
He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne (1960-4) and the École Normale Supérieure (1964-84). From 1984, he was Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. These are well-founded institutions.
He taught regularly at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities in the USA. Alarmingly for the Cambridge dons, his ideas were attractive. By the early 1980s, “Yale deconstruction” had introduced a wide Anglophone readership to the name Derrida, now one of the best-known names in international contemporary philosophy. He died in Paris on 8 October 2004.
So Jacques Derrida was an establishment figure? Not entirely …
In 1957 Derrida planned a doctoral thesis on Husserl’s phenomenology. But he abandoned it

VE REALIZED ITS VALUE BY RECOGNIZING ITS LIMITS – BY NOT ASKING IT TO DO EVERYTHING FOR ME… I HAVE VERY LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE SO DEEPLY INTO DECONSTRUCTION THAT THEY HAVE NOTHING ELSE SUBSTANTIVE TO THINK ABOUT.