139-410: Jacques Derrida ( / ˈ d ɛr ɪ d ə / ; French: [ʒak dɛʁida] ; born Jackie Élie Derrida ; 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction , which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology . He
278-400: A Doctorat de spécialité thesis under Maurice de Gandillac ), and Writing and Difference . On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger , and stated that without them he would not have said a single word. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under
417-532: A "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism", Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from the conception of speech's relation to writing to the understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics". Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in
556-399: A Japanese term contrary to deconstruction 's actual meaning, Derrida began his response by saying that such a question amounts to "what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be". Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction, Derrida
695-400: A broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure . Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism , posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language. Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there
834-418: A concept must be understood in the context of its opposite: for example, the word being does not have meaning without contrast with the word nothing . Further, Derrida contends that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis , but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other ( axiologically , logically, etc.), or has
973-413: A critique—then this would make the concept of critique immune to itself being deconstructed. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to encompass the notion of critique. Derrida states that "Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one". This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as
1112-725: A defense of his intellectual project under the title " L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture " ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing"). The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" (" L'idéalité de l'objet littéraire "); his 1980 dissertation
1251-528: A dialectic that has the purpose of resolving it into a synthesis. The presence of Hegelian dialectics was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century, with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite , but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists , and including the existentialism of Sartre , etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's, since Hegelianism believes binary oppositions would produce
1390-408: A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains
1529-640: A distinguished university". Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida ( Derrida's Elsewhere ) by Safaa Fathy (1999), and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002). On 19 February 2003, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq impending, René Major [ fr ] moderated a debate entitled "Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" between Derrida and Jean Baudrillard , co-hosted by Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis and Le Monde Diplomatique . The debate discussed
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#17327976049721668-536: A full-spread advertisement for the film playing at the Randolph Theatre. The advertisement from First National Pictures featured high praise from Chicago-based newspapers including this review from The Chicago Herald and Examiner : The Kid settles once and for all the question as to who is the greatest theatrical artist in the world. Chaplin does some of the finest, most delicately shaded acting you ever saw anywhere, and for every slapstick furore in it there
1807-491: A handwritten note: "Please love and care for this orphan child". Two thieves steal the car and leave the baby in an alley, where he is found by The Tramp . After some attempts to hand off the child on to various passers-by, he finds the note and his heart melts. He takes the boy home, names him John and adjusts his household furniture for him. Meanwhile, the Mother has a change of heart and returns for her baby; when she learns that
1946-474: A history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This original complexity must not be understood as an original positing , but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It
2085-552: A lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question . It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit", and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of
2224-497: A letter to then-Chancellor Cicerone saying "if the scandalous procedure" against Kujundzic was not "interrupted or cancelled," he would end all his "relations with UCI." Regarding his archival papers, there would be "another consequence: since I never take back what I have given, my papers would of course remain the property of UCI and the Special Collections department of the library. However, it goes without saying that
2363-484: A mechanical operation, when he states that "It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray". Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that: Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of
2502-564: A more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan , who had become well known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid . He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision ; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name". Derrida
2641-528: A number of signs, composed of a signified (the meaning) and a signifier (the word itself). Derrida proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre. This is the basis of différance . The Kid (1921 film) The Kid is a 1921 American silent comedy-drama film written, produced, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin , and features Jackie Coogan as his foundling baby, adopted son and sidekick. This
2780-479: A political and ethical "turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Some refer to The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and
2919-624: A position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of 'preference' ". [Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There
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#17327976049723058-514: A prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find. Derrida states that deconstruction is not a critique in the Kantian sense. This is because Kant defines the term critique as the opposite of dogmatism . For Derrida, it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language used in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. Language is dogmatic because it
3197-444: A procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against
3336-438: A process would never end. Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the identification of metaphysics of presence, or logocentrism in western philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed bias in certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position over another, such as good over bad, speech over
3475-539: A regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars , conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers. On 14 March 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference entitled "Heidegger: Open Questions",
3614-494: A series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the will to power , that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of a subterranean Trophonius, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize readers to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship. Where Nietzsche did not achieve deconstruction, as Derrida sees it,
3753-436: A sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ... means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking." Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology . His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned
3892-738: A synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free from the original contradiction. There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were attempts to define what deconstruction is, and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it. Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative ( apophatic ) than with positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by Toshihiko Izutsu some preliminary considerations on how to translate deconstruction in Japanese, in order to at least prevent using
4031-530: A term under erasure means that even though these terms are problematic, they must be used until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. If Derrida were to positively define deconstruction—as, for example,
4170-484: A third term or leaving room for a solution in the form of a Hegelian dialectic (e.g., différance , archi-writing , pharmakon , supplement, hymen, gram, spacing). Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on semiotics also became a cornerstone of structuralism in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as Roland Barthes (whose works were an investigation of
4309-473: A well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial. Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in a summer home in El Biar ( Algiers ), Algeria, to Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (known as "Aimé") Derrida (1896–1970), who worked all his life for the wine and spirits company Tachet, including as a travelling salesman (his son reflected
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4448-595: Is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism . He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic , patriarchal and masculinist . Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture ", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane , signifier/signified , mind/body ), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order
4587-448: Is a classic, exquisite scene. His action are riotous, convulsive, irresistible. The gentlest grandmother will bust a midriff. He's the best Hamlet alive today. Jackie Coogan is the best child actor you ever saw. Women wept just to see him. The Kid is two fisted. It's right glove is packed with the pearls of tears, its left with the horseshoe of laughter. The picture is perfection. Six reels that seem like one; six reels that are funnier than
4726-406: Is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience"; for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For
4865-443: Is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis , and even in the analysis of scientific writings. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations
5004-427: Is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see
5143-399: Is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves "a certain attention to structures" and tries to "understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted". As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture, deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the "structural problematic". The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is "in
5282-731: Is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale . He also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism ), music (especially in the musical atmosphere of hauntology ), art, and art criticism . Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work. Others cite: Of Grammatology (1967) Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements. He became
5421-602: Is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture. In 1968, he published his influential essay " Plato's Pharmacy " in the French journal Tel Quel . This essay was later collected in Dissemination , one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with
5560-412: Is inescapably metaphysical . Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of signifiers that only refer to that which transcends them—the signified. In addition, Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?" By this, Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of
5699-429: Is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic". He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is. Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name deconstruction , on
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5838-480: Is largely based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who, in Being and Time , claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as ready-to-hand and being-with . In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is to not collapse into Hegel's dialectic, where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in
5977-443: Is no outside-text" ( il n'y a pas de hors-texte ). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written " Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte " ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become
6116-606: Is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics. A survey of the secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy in which Derrida is working. These secondary works (e.g. Deconstruction for Beginners and Deconstructions: A User's Guide ) have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized for being too far removed from
6255-478: Is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values. Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in
6394-564: Is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity". During his career, Derrida published over 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences , including philosophy, literature, law , anthropology , historiography , applied linguistics , sociolinguistics , psychoanalysis , music , architecture, and political theory . Into
6533-512: Is one statement by Derrida—in an essay on Rousseau in Of Grammatology —which has been of great interest to his opponents. It is the assertion that "there is no outside-text" ( il n'y a pas de hors-texte ), which is often mistranslated as "there is nothing outside of the text". The mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists but words. Michel Foucault , for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida
6672-403: Is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts". This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method, because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure". Derrida's necessity of returning to
6811-515: Is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of difference inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text is influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure . Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language: In language there are only differences. Even more important:
6950-516: Is that he missed the opportunity to further explore the will to power as more than a manifestation of the sociopolitically effective operation of writing that Plato characterized, stepping beyond Nietzsche's penultimate revaluation of all Western values, to the ultimate, which is the emphasis on "the role of writing in the production of knowledge". Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all discourse has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This
7089-451: Is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to continue to be deceived by an illusory grasp of satisfactorily complete reason. Mere proposals of heightened reasoning, logic, philosophizing and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. Nietzsche disregards Platonism to revisualize the history of the West as the self-perpetuating history of
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#17327976049727228-420: Is the observation that the meanings of words come from their synchrony with other words within the language and their diachrony between contemporary and historical definitions of a word. Understanding language, according to Derrida, requires an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus on diachrony has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the etymological fallacy . There
7367-588: Is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction". Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating
7506-563: The Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community. Some have argued that Derrida's work took
7645-502: The Sacrifice of Isaac , and from Søren Kierkegaard 's Fear and Trembling . However, scholars such as Leonard Lawlor , Robert Magliola , and Nicole Anderson (philosopher) have argued that the "turn" has been exaggerated. Some, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays. Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring
7784-689: The Tel Quel group, after 1971, was connected to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution . With " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences ", his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University , his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man ,
7923-555: The University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University , The New School for Social Research , the University of Essex , Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , the University of Silesia , the University of Coimbra , the University of Athens , and many others around the world. In 2001, he received the Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt . Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in
8062-614: The Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée . He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau , Nietzsche , and Gide ) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Camus and Sartre . In
8201-705: The Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture . By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture " deconstruction ". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism . With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of
8340-470: The aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects. Derrida's interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena , Of Grammatology (initially submitted as
8479-671: The 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce 's Ulysses at the Widener Library . During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959. Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne , where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston Bachelard ), Georges Canguilhem , Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined
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#17327976049728618-548: The 2000s, his work retained major academic influence throughout the United States, continental Europe , South America and all other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology , epistemology (especially concerning social sciences ), ethics, aesthetics , hermeneutics , and the philosophy of language . In most of the Anglosphere , where analytic philosophy
8757-564: The Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference ). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism , then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of
8896-681: The Film Society of Lincoln Center gala tribute to Chaplin held on April 4, 1972, at Philharmonic Hall, New York City, with Chaplin in attendance. The Kid premiered on January 21, 1921, at Carnegie Hall in New York City as a benefit for the Children's Fund of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. The Kid was acclaimed by film critics upon its release. The February 5, 1921 issue of Exhibitor's Herald , contained
9035-475: The Library of Congress' National Film Registry. The registry stated that the film is "an artful melding of touching drama, social commentary and inventive comedy" and praised Chaplin's ability to "sustain his artistry beyond the length of his usual short subjects and could deftly elicit a variety of emotions from his audiences by skillfully blending slapstick and pathos." As of January 2021, The Kid has earned
9174-507: The Mother advises the Tramp to call a doctor after the Kid falls ill. The doctor discovers that the Tramp is not the Kid's father and notifies authorities. Two men come to take the boy to an orphanage, but after a fight and a chase, the Tramp and the boy remain side by side. When the Mother comes back to see how the boy is doing she encounters the doctor, who shows her the note (which he had taken from
9313-457: The Mother and the Kid unknowingly cross paths. The Kid later gets into a fight with another local boy as people in the area gather to watch the spectacle. The Kid wins, drawing the ire of the other boy's older brother, who attacks the Tramp as a result. The Mother breaks up the fight, but it starts again after she leaves and the Tramp keeps beating the "Big Brother" over the head with a brick between swings until he totters away. Shortly afterward,
9452-475: The Tramp); she recognizes it as the one she left with her baby years ago. Now fugitives, the Tramp and the boy spend the night in a flophouse . Its proprietor learns of a $ 1,000 reward offered by the authorities and takes the Kid to the police station, while the Tramp is asleep. As the tearful Mother is reunited with her long-lost child, the Tramp searches frantically for the missing boy. Unsuccessful, he returns to
9591-428: The analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine , Marcus , and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in
9730-428: The article on différance . Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which " structuralism was dominant" and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture" because "[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented". At the same time, deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture" because it
9869-559: The authors who have been influenced by deconstruction. Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas , an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger 's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively. Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot , Paul Celan , and others. In 1991 he published The Other Heading , in which he discussed
10008-459: The boundaries they currently occupy" "While in a sense it is impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction's part than with the impossibility of every 'is' as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as
10147-428: The car has been stolen, she faints. Five years pass. The Kid and the Tramp live in the same tiny room; they have little money but much love. They support themselves in a minor scheme: the Kid throws stones to break windows so that the Tramp, working as a glazier , can be paid to repair them. Meanwhile, the Mother has become a wealthy actress and does charity by giving presents to poor children. By chance, as she does so,
10286-507: The concept of identity (as in cultural identity , European identity , and national identity ), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism." Deconstruction In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning . The concept of deconstruction
10425-423: The contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality. Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as "neostructuralism", identifying a "distaste for the metaphysical concepts of domination and system". The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of
10564-420: The current of Derrida's philosophical adventure. Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction, because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading, because it becomes
10703-519: The doorway of their humble lodgings, where he falls asleep, entering a "Dreamland" where his neighbors have turned into angels and devils. A policeman awakes him and drives him off to a mansion. There the door is opened by the Mother and the Kid, who jumps into the Tramp's arms, and he is welcomed in. Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, edited and starred in The Kid , and later composed a score. Innovative in its combination of comedic and dramatic elements,
10842-490: The end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH; 'International college of philosophy'), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel. On 8 May 1985, Derrida
10981-514: The end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone". Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of "mark" rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as
11120-399: The essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions . Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980). Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was
11259-411: The essential mode of creation or movement", and structure: "systems, or complexes, or static configurations". An example of genesis would be the sensory ideas from which knowledge is then derived in the empirical epistemology . An example of structure would be a binary opposition such as good and evil where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to
11398-603: 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 from the necessity of analysis. Derrida called these undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition. Instead, they inhabit philosophical oppositions —resisting and organizing them—without ever constituting
11537-399: The film is considered one of the greatest of the silent era. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance maintains that, with its "perfect blend of comedy and drama, [it] is arguably Chaplin's most personal and autobiographical work.” The film made Coogan, then a vaudeville performer, into the first major child star of the movies. It has been speculated that the depth of the relationship portrayed in
11676-415: The film may have been connected with the death of Chaplin's firstborn infant son just ten days before the production began. First National wanted to release the film as 3 two reel comedies, not a seven reel feature. Chaplin wanted the film released as a complete work. Releasing it as 3 separate short films also meant First National owed Chaplin a much smaller salary. After production was completed in 1920,
11815-515: The film was caught up in the divorce actions of Chaplin's first wife Mildred Harris , who sought to attach Chaplin's assets. Chaplin and his associates smuggled the raw negative to Salt Lake City and edited it in a room at the Hotel Utah . To release the complete film and avoid it being part of his divorce proceedings, Chaplin showed First National executives a cut of the film. He used this screening to re-negotiate his contract. Before releasing
11954-487: The film, Chaplin negotiated to receive an enhanced financial deal based on the success of the final film. This included 50% of the box-office once First National's budget of $ 1.5 Million had been reached and full ownership returned to Chaplin after 5 years. Chaplin eventually removed scenes he believed too sentimental for modern audiences and composed and recorded a new musical score for the film's theatrical reissue. This re-edited version of The Kid had its world premiere as
12093-434: The forms and varieties of the originary complexity of semiotics , and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting readings of philosophical and literary texts, with the goal to understand what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show
12232-431: The grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way. Derrida's deconstruction strategy is also used by postmodernists to locate meaning in a text rather than discover meaning due to
12371-466: The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself (because it is necessary for meaning). Deconstruction, Derrida says, only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and hierarchies intrinsic to all texts. Derrida further 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
12510-513: The history behind them. Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several issues: To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the Western metaphysical tradition. Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence
12649-889: The idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas , Walter Benjamin , Carl Schmitt , Jan Patočka , on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory , anthropology , sociology, historiography , law, psychoanalysis , theology, feminism , gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy , Richard Rorty , Geoffrey Hartman , Harold Bloom , Rosalind Krauss , Hélène Cixous , Julia Kristeva , Duncan Kennedy , Gary Peller , Drucilla Cornell , Alan Hunt , Hayden White , Mario Kopić , and Alun Munslow are some of
12788-424: The infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects. Deconstruction denotes the pursuing of the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It
12927-586: The interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. ...this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena . Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in
13066-626: The job was "exhausting" and "humiliating", his father forced to be a "docile employee" to the extent of waking early to do the accounts at the dining-room table), and Georgette Sultana Esther (1901–1991), daughter of Moïse Safar. His family was Sephardic Jewish, (originally from Toledo ) and became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. His parents named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although he would later adopt
13205-705: The late 1940s, he attended the Lycée Bugeaud [ fr ] , in Algiers; in 1949 he moved to Paris, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne . At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser , with whom he became friends. A professor of his, Jan Czarnecki,
13344-473: The latter an important interlocutor in the years to come. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books— Writing and Difference , Speech and Phenomena , and Of Grammatology . In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University ) and was awarded his State doctorate ( doctorat d'État ) by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with
13483-425: The logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood in opposition to the theories of structuralists such as psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan , and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss . However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as " post-structuralist ". Derrida's motivation for developing deconstructive criticism, suggesting the fluidity of language over static forms,
13622-415: The majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. Derrida published a number of other works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction, such as Différance , Speech and Phenomena , and Writing and Difference . To Derrida, That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity , the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at
13761-416: The metaphysical type that something is the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence de-sediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once. Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis in the traditional sense. This
13900-404: The movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism . The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy . The conference
14039-509: The new First National release--which proves the contention that Chaplin is almost as good a tragedian as he is a comedian. The Kid may be counted as a screen masterpiece." The reviewer for The New York Times gave more of a mixed reception to the film, writing: "Charlie Chaplin is himself again - at his best, in some ways better than his previous best, and also, it is to be regretted, at his worst, only not with so much of his worst as has spoiled some of his earlier pictures." The reviewer praises
14178-586: The original texts and Derrida's actual position. Cambridge Dictionary states that deconstruction is "the act of breaking something down into its separate parts in order to understand its meaning, especially when this is different from how it was previously understood". The Merriam-Webster dictionary states that deconstruction is "the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy". Derrida's observations have greatly influenced literary criticism and post-structuralism. Derrida's method consisted of demonstrating all
14317-475: The other element. It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from post-structuralism , a term that would suggest that philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that "the motif of deconstruction has been associated with 'post-structuralism ' ", but that this term was "a word unknown in France until its 'return' from the United States". In his deconstruction of Edmund Husserl , Derrida actually argues for
14456-411: The philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007. Derrida was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University , Yale University , New York University , Stony Brook University , The New School for Social Research , and European Graduate School . He was awarded honorary doctorates by
14595-440: The plot, the comedy, the characters, and the "balance of sadness" with Chaplin being "more of a comedian than a clown", but lamented elements of "vulgarity, or coarseness". Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance writes of the legacy of Chaplin's The Kid : " The Kid remains an important contribution to the art of film, not only because of Chaplin's innovative use of dramatic sequences within a feature-length comedy, but also because of
14734-435: The polis. However, unlike Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied with such a merely political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma in which modern humans find themselves. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity , hence his attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of his Nietzschean sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism . Différance
14873-409: The position that it has multiple readings. There is a focus on the deconstruction that denotes the tearing apart of a text to find arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions for the purpose of tracing contradictions that shadow a text's coherence. Here, the meaning of a text does not reside with the author or the author's intentions because it is dependent on the interaction between reader and text. Even
15012-642: The present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre , "wholly other", beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"." Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas , these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure , Hegel , Foucault , Bataille , Descartes , anthropologist Lévi-Strauss , paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan , psychoanalyst Freud , and writers such as Jabès and Artaud . This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach
15151-520: The process of translation is also seen as transformative since it "modifies the original even as it modifies the translating language". Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins University , " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences ", often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. Structuralism viewed language as
15290-458: The pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else. Derrida's original use of the word deconstruction was a translation of Destruktion , a concept from the work of Martin Heidegger that Derrida sought to apply to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and
15429-414: The question", "the essence of technology", "the discourse of animality", and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order." Of Spirit contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías , who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of
15568-597: The relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston . Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002. He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of 9 October 2004. At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to University of Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation
15707-424: The revelations The Kid provides about its creator. Undoubtedly, when Chaplin penned the preface to The Kid , "A picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear", he had his own artistic credo—and life—in mind." Mary Pickford said of the film, "The Kid is one of the finest examples of the screen language, depending upon its actions rather than upon subtitles". In December 2011, The Kid was chosen to be preserved in
15846-642: The rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerge: the Other as opposed to the Same "Deconstructive analysis deprives
15985-404: The same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. According to Derrida, and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure , language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs. As Richard Rorty contends, "words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words ... no word can acquire meaning in
16124-623: The spirit in which I contributed to the constitution of these archives (which is still underway and growing every year) would have been seriously damaged. Without renouncing my commitments, I would regret having made them and would reduce their fulfillment to the barest minimum." After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed
16263-430: The structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has
16402-510: The term hermeneutics of suspicion ), and Jean Wahl . His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre , in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite , Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years. Derrida's subsequent distance from
16541-584: The term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?" His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy , his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II ). He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this Geflecht [braid]": "the question of
16680-555: The term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position. "to show that things - texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need - do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed
16819-479: The topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance . Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries. Such
16958-453: The upper hand": signified over signifier ; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction is, according to Derrida, to find and overturn these oppositions inside text(s); but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense: the oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all, as
17097-437: The very different phrase Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte for this purpose. According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance . For example, the word house derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from shed , mansion , hotel , building , etc. (form of content, which Louis Hjelmslev distinguished from form of expression) than how
17236-408: The very heart of the Western intellectual tradition , characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism , and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise
17375-490: The way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sensed observation, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form )". As a consequence, meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the—in his view, mistaken—belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence . Rather, according to Derrida,
17514-587: The word house may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e., the relationship between signified and signifier ), with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition: when can one talk about a house or a mansion or a shed ? The same can be said about verbs in all languages: when should one stop saying walk and start saying run ? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must one stop saying yellow and start saying orange , or exchange past for present ? Not only are
17653-493: The work of Edmund Husserl . Gary Banham has said that the dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation." In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction , which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In
17792-417: The work of any other human being; six reels that are sadder and simpler than anything in pictures; six reels that will atone for anything the movies have ever done. A reviewer from Theatre Magazine glowingly wrote: "[Chaplin's] new picture, The Kid , certainly outdoes in humor and the special brand of Chaplin pathos anything this popular film star has yet produced. There are almost as many tears as laughs in
17931-488: The written word, male over female. Derrida writes, Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks of time on the basis of ousia as parousia , on the basis of the now, the point, etc. And yet an entire reading could be organized that would repeat in Aristotle's text both this limitation and its opposite. To Derrida, the central bias of logocentrism was the now being placed as more important than the future or past. This argument
18070-552: Was Chaplin's first full-length film as a director. It was a huge success and was the second-highest-grossing film in 1921. Now considered one of the greatest films of the silent era, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2011. With much anguish, an unwed Mother abandons her child, placing him in an expensive automobile with
18209-609: Was a progressive Protestant who would become a signer of the Manifesto of the 121 . After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven , Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy ( diplôme d'études supérieures [ fr ] ) on Edmund Husserl (see below ). He then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University , and he spent
18348-424: Was also where he met Paul de Man , who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan , with whose work Derrida had a mixed relationship. In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism , which
18487-414: Was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a "phenomenology vs structuralism debate". Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl,
18626-563: Was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , to Class IV – Humanities, Section 3 -Criticism and Philology. In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine , where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. When Derrida's colleague, Dragan Kujundzic, was accused of sexual assault, Derrida wrote
18765-411: Was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age." Derrida referred to himself as a historian. He questioned assumptions of
18904-709: Was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida , who described it as a turn away from Platonism 's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances. Since the 1980s, these proposals of language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies in the humanities , including the disciplines of law , anthropology , historiography , linguistics , sociolinguistics , psychoanalysis , LGBT studies , and feminism . Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art , music , and literary criticism . Jacques Derrida's 1967 book Of Grammatology introduced
19043-544: Was largely inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche 's philosophy, beginning with his interpretation of Trophonius . In Daybreak , Nietzsche announces that "All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?". Nietzsche's point in Daybreak
19182-482: Was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance . Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script. Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor ( directeur d'études ) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at
19321-510: Was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar. On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas set by
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