Jacques Derrida: biography of this French philosopher

This philosopher is a key historical figure in the evolution of contemporary thought.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher, recognized as one of the most influential of the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions that have been part of contemporary Western philosophy. He is, among other things, the founder of "deconstruction", a way of critically analyzing the literary organization of texts and philosophy, as well as the political organization of institutions.

In this article we will see developed the biography of Jacques Derridaone of the most influential philosophers for literary and political theory and criticism of the 20th and 21st century.

Jacques Derrida: biography of an influential contemporary philosopher

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El Biar, Algeria, which at the time was a French colony.which at that time was a French colony. The son of Spanish-Jewish parents, he was educated in the French tradition from an early age.

In 1949, after World War II, he tried to enter the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. But it was not until 1952 that he managed to gain admission, after repeating the entrance exam for the second time. He was formed in an intellectual climate where several of the most representative philosophers of the twentieth century were on the rise.. For example, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Althusser, Lacan, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss or Levinas.

Derrida worked closely with some of them, and also remained critical of several of their proposals. For example, he made important readings on the works of Levinas and Michel Foucault, whom he criticized for his interpretation of Descartes.

Likewise, he developed his work in what was the century of the development and rise of phenomenology.. Derrida was formed very close to its greatest exponent, Edmund Husserl. Later he specialized in Hegel's philosophy together with Jean Hyppolite and Maurice de Gandillac, with whom he wrote a doctoral thesis in 1953 on "The ideality of the literary object".

Academic activity

In the following years his work became very extensive and complex, while he worked as a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne University from 1960 to 1964, a period in which he and published numerous articles and books on a Wide range of topics. on a wide range of topics.

Later he also taught at his alma mater, the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, all in Paris. He was also a visiting professor at various universities around the world, including Yale University and the University of California.

Deconstruction and meaning

Jacques Derrida is recognized among other things for having developed "deconstruction", which refers to a rather complex act whose interpretation and applications can be very different, and which nevertheless has marked the philosophical production of much of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Broadly speaking, Derrida uses deconstruction to critically examine the conceptual paradigms on which Western society has been based from the beginnings of Greek philosophy to the present day.

These paradigms are strongly loaded with a particular element: dichotomies (hierarchical oppositions between two concepts), which have generated binary thoughts and understandings about the phenomena of the world and about human beings. They have also generated forms of identification and construction of determined subjectivities.

Being hierarchical oppositions, they have as a consequence that we understand one of the two phenomena of the dichotomy as the primary or fundamental phenomenon, and the second as a derivative. For example, what happens in the classic distinction between mind and body; nature and culture; the literal and the metaphorical, among many others.

Through deconstruction, Derrida made visible and operative the way in which philosophy, science, science, philosophy, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science. philosophy, science, art or politics have emerged as a result of these oppositions, which, among other things, has had an impact on the way philosophy, science, art or politics have emerged as a result of these oppositions.which among other things has had effects in subjective terms, and in social experience and organization.

And he made it visible and operative mainly through examine the contradictions and tensions between these hierarchies (whether explicitly or implicitly (whether they are presented explicitly or implicitly), as well as analyzing their consequences in terms of the construction of meaning.

Precisely what follows from the latter is the suggestion that the paradigms on which our societies have settled are not natural, immovable, nor necessary in themselves; rather, they are a product or a construction.

Literary criticism and text analysis

While Derrida develops this from literary criticism, deconstruction applies initially to the analysis of the text.. An example is the opposition between discourse and writing, where discourse is understood as the primary and most authentic element. Derrida shows that the same composition that is traditionally associated with writing is present in discourse, as is the possibility of equivocation.

By unveiling the constracciditions in the composition structure, it is shown the impossibility of creating terms which are primordial, and therefore hierarchicaland therefore hierarchical, so that there may be a possibility of restructuring.

For Derrida, the meaning of a word is a function that takes place in the contrast shown by relating it to another. From this it follows that meaning is never fully, nor "truly" revealed to us, as if the word itself were the object it names in itself. Rather, it is senses that we share after a long and infinite chain of meanings contrasted with each other.

Bibliographical references:

• Encyclopedia Britannica (2018). Jacques Derrida. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 26, 2018. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Derrida.
• Lawlor, L. (2018). Jacques Derrida. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved June 26, 2018. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/.