Histories of Violence

Biography

Jacques Derrida was born in El-Bair, French Algeria, to Algerian-Jewish parents on 15 July 1930. When he was 22 years old Derrida moved to Paris to start his studies at the prestigious École Normale Supérieur, taking a particular interest in the work of Edmund Husserl. In 1956-57 Derrida received a grant allowing him to study for a year at Harverd University. During his time in America he married Marguerite Aucouturie, a psychoanalyst, in 1957. From 1957-1959 during the Algerian War of Independence, he taught soldiers children in lieu of military service and following the war he briefly taught at the Sorbonne university in Paris. During this time he would take interest in the writing philosophy, and began a collaboration with the leftist Tel Quel magazine which lasted a number of years as well as writing a number of reviews and articles for the Critique magazine, also based in Paris. In 1963 his wife gave birth to their first son, Pierre and two years later Derrida began a permanent teaching position at the École Normale Supérieur.

In 1967 Derrida travelled to John Hopkins University to deliver his lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” This lecture was to grant him international prominence and in the same year he published 3 books, Speah and Phenomena; Writing and Difference; and Of Grammatology. The last of these books truly established his name. In it, he analyses Western Philosophy from pre-Socrates to Heidegger, arguing that the status afforded to logos serves to denigrate the writing act. Rather than challenge this prevailing norm Derrida developed a way of identifying logocentric patterns in writing, dubbed “deconstruction”. One year later in 1968 Derrida coined the term Différance, alluding to the inherent ambiguity in language. The term refers to how words and concepts are not defined by the word themselves but always need to be followed up with other words to provide context, and that context provides meaning. In such a way, he reveals the impurity of writing and by extrapolation, the impurity of identity as well. If origins are not ‘simple’ but built upon writing which in turn derives meaning from context, then identity too is impure, incapable of being defined without the context upon which it relies.

In 1986 Derrida moved to work at the University of California, and regularly spoke at various other prestigious American and European institutions. In 1992 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. In 2003 Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died the following year in a Parisian hospital, 8^th October, 2004. One of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th century, Derrida’s work blurs disciplinary boundaries and he has had an especially strong influence in the fields of philosophy and literary criticism.