Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a highly influential 20th century French philosopher and founder of deconstruction. Born in Algeria to a Jewish family, Derrida experienced discrimination as a child. In his work Of Grammatology, Derrida introduced ideas like how language relies on contrasts between signs to generate meaning, and how meaning is never fully present but deferred through an endless chain of signifiers. Deconstruction examines philosophical assumptions about concepts like presence and meaning, arguing they rely on binary oppositions that require and undermine each other. Derrida's work had wide-ranging impacts across many academic fields through challenging prevailing assumptions.

1. Jacques Derrida
(1930 –2004)

2. “il n'y a pas de hors-texte”
“There is no outside-text”
Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology

3. Jacques Derrida was one of the most well known
twentieth century philosophers.
He was also one of the most prolific.
He was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of
criticizing not only both literary and philosophical
texts but also political institutions.

4. Derrida was born in 1930 into a Jewish family in
Algiers. He was also born into an environment of some
discrimination.
In fact, he either withdrew from, or was forced out of
at least two schools during his childhood simply on account of
being Jewish.
While Derrida would resist any reductive
understanding of his work based upon his biographical life, it
could be argued that these kind of experiences played a large
role in his insistence upon the importance of the marginal, and
the other, in his later thought.

5. It was in 1967 that Derrida really arrived
as a philosopher of world importance. He
published three momentous texts (Of
Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and
Speech and Phenomena).
All of these works have been influential for
different reasons, but it is Of Grammatology that
remains his most famous work.

6. Jacques Derrida was the founder of “deconstruction,”
a way of criticizing not only both literary and
philosophical texts but also political institutions.
Derrida's fame nearly reached the status of a media
star, with hundreds of people filling auditoriums to
hear him speak, with films and televisions programs
devoted to him, with countless books and articles
devoted to his thinking.

7. Deconstruction has frequently been the subject of some
controversy. When Derrida was awarded an honorary
doctorate at Cambridge in 1992, there were howls of
protest from many 'analytic' philosophers. Since then,
Derrida has also had many dialogues with philosophers
like John Searle, in which deconstruction has been
roundly criticized, although perhaps unfairly at times.

8. Deconstruction is a critical outlook concerned
with the relationship between text and meaning.
Jacque Derrida’s work Of Grammatology
introduced the majority of ideas influential within
deconstruction.
According to Derrida and taking inspiration from
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, language is a
system of signs and words only have meaning because
of the contrast between these signs.

9. As a consequence meaning is never present, but
rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the,
in this view, mistaken belief that there is a self-
sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of
presence.
A concept then must be understood in the context
of its opposite, such as being/nothingness,
normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.

10. Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and
deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a
nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby preventing any means of
intervening in the field effectively".
To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms,
not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their
difference and eternal interplay.
This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in
his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of
analysis, to better mark the intervals.

11. In the 1980s, deconstruction was being put to use in a range of
theoretical enterprises in the humanities and social sciences,
including law anthropology, historiography, linguistics,
sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and LGBT studies.
In the continental philosophy tradition, debates surrounding
ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and
philosophy of language still refer to it today. Within
architecture it has inspired deconstructivism, and it remains
important in general within art, music,and literary criticism.

12. Différance: Derrida first uses the term différance in 1963. The term
différance then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the
philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. We can
understand this term using simple example, the word "house"
derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from
"shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. than how the word
"house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e. the
relationship between signifier and signified) with each term being
established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by
an ostensive description or definition. Thus, meaning is always
"differential" and postponed in language; there is never a moment
when meaning is complete and total.

13. Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Derrida
http://plato.stanford.edu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/