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90-559: The Foundation was deemed a "centre of ideological subversion" by the Czech police, and several of the visiting philosophers, including Jacques Derrida , Roger Scruton and Anthony Kenny , were arrested or placed on the "Index of Undesirable Persons". In 1998 Václav Havel , the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the democratic Czech Republic , awarded Roger Scruton the Medal of Merit (First Class) for his work on behalf of

180-404: 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

270-572: A Commonwealth Fellowship to study at the University of Toronto , where in the fields of philosophy and political economy he was awarded a doctorate and mentored and supervised by C.B. Macpherson . He later held a post-doctoral fellowship at King’s College , at the University of Cambridge, where he worked closely with Anthony Giddens , Quentin Skinner and other leading scholars. John Keane

360-434: A clandestine seminar. Followed for several days, stopped at the end of the week, finally arrested at the airport, and, after a police operation on his suitcase in which they pretend to discover a brown powder, he is imprisoned on the charge of "production and trafficking of drugs". Signature campaign for his release. Released ("expelled") from Czechoslovakia after an energetic intervention of [President] François Mitterrand and

450-729: 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

540-643: 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

630-616: A grant from the Literae Humaniores board. Others who became involved included Alan Montefiore and Anthony Kenny from Oxford; Ernest Gellner from King's College, Cambridge ; Roger Scruton from Birkbeck College, London ; Anthony Savile from King's College, London ; and Thomas Nagel from New York University . Branches of the Foundation sprang up in France and Germany. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Pierre Vernant set up

720-465: A historian. He questioned assumptions of 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

810-477: 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

900-553: 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

990-636: A letter stating that a tweet of his depicted the Hamas flag, which could "only be understood as support for Hamas and their actions". Keane said the allegations were "absurd" and that "My posting of an image of green flags was … a message to trigger multiple thoughts among its addressees". During his many years in Britain, the Times of London described him as 'one of the world's leading political thinkers and writers. El País (Madrid) has ranked him as 'among

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1080-497: 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

1170-568: 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

1260-479: 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

1350-608: A position at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), which he resigned from in November 2023. In 2021 Keane published the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism co-authored by Debasish Roy Chowdhury. Keane first studied Politics, Government and History at the University of Adelaide , winning the Tinline Prize for a First Class Honours with Highest Distinction (1971). He won

1440-537: 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 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

1530-543: 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",

1620-476: 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

1710-546: 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

1800-421: 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

1890-407: 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

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1980-735: 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

2070-606: 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

2160-414: 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 the work of Edmund Husserl . Gary Banham has said that the dissertation

2250-572: Is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. Well before the European revolutions of 1989 , John Keane first came to public prominence as a theorist and defender of ‘ civil society ’ and the democratic opposition in central-eastern Europe. Throughout the 1980s, he contributed extensively to the programme of ‘ flying university ’ apartment seminars in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. His political and scholarly writing during that period

2340-589: 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

2430-471: The Gadamer professorship, whose invitation 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

2520-564: 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

2610-508: 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

2700-690: 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 ,

2790-497: 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

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2880-616: 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

2970-471: 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

3060-673: 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

3150-549: 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

3240-747: The Chairman ( J. L. Mackie ) should send a letter of support to the Czechoslovakian philosophers. It was agreed to ask the Lit. Hum [Literae Humaniores] Board to make a grant to cover the cost of sending two members of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty to meet with the Czechoslovakian philosophers." Kathy Wilkes of St. Hilda's and Steven Lukes of Balliol were the first philosophers to visit Tomin. Wilkes visited in April 1979, carrying books for

3330-757: The Communist Party in 1989. The Foundation continued to support education in the new Czech Republic . In October 1998 at Magdalen College, Oxford , President Václav Havel awarded the Foundation, Kathy Wilkes and Barbara Day Commemorative Medals of the President of the Republic. Roger Scruton was awarded the Medal of Merit (First Class) of the Czech Republic. A plaque was unveiled at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge in October 2018 to commemorate

3420-511: 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

3510-596: The French branch in 1981 with Derrida as vice-president. Derrida, Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat , who was born in Brno , all travelled to Czechoslovakia to conduct a seminar, as did John Keane and David Regan . Scruton arranged for several of the students to study for the Cambridge Diploma and Certificate in Religious Studies, chosen because Cambridge was the only university that would allow

3600-570: The French government. Derrida had been working on Franz Kafka 's " Before the Law " at the time—Kafka was born in Prague—and believed the drugs had been planted while he was visiting Kafka's grave. His Czech lawyer said the arrest was like a Kafka story, complete with nudity, photographs and a prison uniform. The underground network was active until the Velvet Revolution saw the overthrow of

3690-520: The Guardian referred to monitory democracy as an "ugly phrase". They critique the theory as being "at best a partial description of what democracy is and what it needs to be". The article states that "monitory democracy can function only if it learns to co-exist with some of those democratic ideas that Keane is too quick to dismiss...". Similarly, the Telegraph stated "What Keane himself fails to see

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3780-728: The Index of Undesirable Persons. His book Thinkers of the New Left was published that year; he said it was written in response to his experiences in the Eastern Bloc. The most prominent arrest was that of Jacques Derrida in Prague in December 1981. He spent 24 hours in custody, supposedly for drug smuggling, after the police planted drugs in his suitcase. According to the philosopher Geoffrey Bennington : [Derrida] goes to Prague to run

3870-663: The Japanese translation (2014) was ranked in the top three non-fiction books of that year published in Japan. His most recent books are When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017); Power and Humility: the Future of Monitory Democracy (2018); The New Despotism (2020) and The Shortest History of Democracy (2022). He was recently nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize and the Holberg Prize for outstanding global contributions to

3960-428: 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

4050-560: 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

4140-425: The book. Hobson states that it is unclear "whether all the changes Keane identifies collectively constitute something coherent enough to be considered a new kind of democracy". However, he states that monitory democracy provides a "valuable opening to begin discussing these issues, as part of considering the current shape and likely future of democracy". In another review of 'The Life and Death of Democracy' (2009),

4230-486: 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." John Keane (political theorist) Born in southern Australia, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney . For 25 years he also held

4320-447: 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 a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure . Saussure, considered to be one of

4410-399: The democratic nature of political representation as it changes the notion from "'one person, one vote, one representative'" and instead embodies the principles of "one person, many interests, many voices, multiple votes, multiple representatives" . Keane's theory of monitory democracy outlined in 'The Life and Death of Democracy' (2009) has been critiqued by Christopher Hobson in a review of

4500-492: 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

4590-399: 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

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4680-586: The faculty's support, and in November 2019 the British ambassador to the Czech Republic, Nick Archer, unveiled a plaque on the building in Keramická Street, in the Letná area of Prague, in which the early underground seminars were held. Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida ( / ˈ d ɛr ɪ d ə / ; French: [ʒak dɛʁida] ; born Jackie Élie Derrida ; 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004)

4770-419: 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 is no outside-text" ( il n'y a pas de hors-texte ). Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated

4860-488: The human sciences. In The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane coined the term monitory democracy for a phase of democracy characterised by instruments of public monitoring and scrutinising of government power. It began following the events of the Second World War . Monitory institutions refer to 'watch-dog' and 'guide-dog' bodies which subject governments to a public mechanism of checks and balances. Under

4950-892: 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

5040-586: 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

5130-631: 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

5220-711: 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,

5310-474: 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

5400-408: 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

5490-413: 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

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5580-464: The philosophy faculty at the University of Oxford, one year after it was sent. The letter was read out to the faculty by William Newton-Smith of Balliol during a meeting in January 1979; the final item on the agenda was "Letter from Czechoslovakian philosophers". Those present voted to offer financial support and to send two philosophers to address the seminars. The minutes noted: It was agreed that

5670-424: 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 a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ... means nothing else: there

5760-654: 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

5850-585: The prize-winning, best selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013) and a full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). Forthcoming in Arabic, it has been published in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Korean; it was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Literary Award (2012) while

5940-415: 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

6030-503: 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

6120-644: 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

6210-624: 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

6300-432: 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

6390-485: The students to sit for a qualification remotely and in secret. Several philosophers who travelled to give seminars were detained by the Czech police or expelled from the country. William Newton-Smith was detained in March 1980, as was Anthony Kenny, then Master of Balliol, the following month. Kathy Wilkes was arrested, searched and escorted to the airport in or around May 1980. Roger Scruton was detained in 1985 and placed on

6480-540: The students, and gave Commemorative Medals of the President of the Republic to the Foundation and two of its organizers, Barbara Day and Kathy Wilkes. In 2019 the British ambassador to the Czech Republic, Nick Archer, unveiled a plaque on the building in the Letná area of Prague in which the early seminars were held. The Foundation was created after Czech dissident philosopher Julius Tomin wrote in 1978 to four Western universities asking them to support philosophy seminars he

6570-437: The students. Her first seminar was on Aristotle at Tomin's apartment in Keramická Street from 6 pm to midnight; she gave another a few days later, for 25 people, on "Identity of Human Personality". She told her colleagues that one of the books she took over had apparently been read by 40 people within the week. When she returned to Oxford, Wilkes asked its Literae Humaniores board for financial support (at that time philosophy

6660-514: 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

6750-586: 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

6840-408: The theory of monitory democracy these institutions extend the notions of representative democracy to "enfranchise many more citizens voices" in the political process. The ability to publicly monitor government power enabled through these institutions has the effect of changing the political and geographic dynamics of existing representative democracies. According to Keane, monitory democracy adds to

6930-408: 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

7020-411: 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

7110-500: The world's leading analysts of political systems' (2018). The Australian Broadcasting Commission called him 'one of the great intellectual exports from Australia.' His work has been translated into approximately 35 languages. During the period 2014-2019, his experimental online column "Democracy Field Notes" attracted nearly a million readers in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne-based The Conversation . Among his best-known books are

7200-797: The world’s first democracy research institute, the London-based Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD). During the past decade, he founded and directed the Sydney Democracy Network (SDN). He has contributed to The New York Times , Al Jazeera , the Times Literary Supplement , The Guardian , Harper's , the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post . In November 2023 he resigned from WZB after WZB wrote him

7290-435: 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 is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned

7380-610: 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

7470-564: Was a sub-faculty of Literae Humaniores), and urged other philosophers to pay a visit, to be coordinated by William Newton-Smith. An article appeared about the seminars in the New Statesman in May. Wilkes wrote one for The Guardian a few days later and another appeared at the end of May in Isis . The philosophy faculty agreed to send Charles Taylor of All Souls , and books were purchased with

7560-424: 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

7650-414: 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,

7740-564: 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

7830-503: Was holding in his apartment in Prague. The seminars were known as bytové semináře ("home seminars"). Tomin called his discussion group " Jan Patočka University", after the Czech philosopher who died in 1977 after being interrogated by police. Correspondence from the Eastern Bloc was slow and uncertain; one commentator compared it to sending a message in a bottle. Only one letter is known to have arrived at its intended destination,

7920-517: Was published under the pen name Erica Blair. His Times Literary Supplement series of 18th-century-style dialogues with prominent underground human rights figures such as Adam Michnik and György Konrád was read widely, and translated into many languages. He arranged and edited Vaclav Havel ’s first book in English, The Power of the Powerless (1985). In the spring of 1989, just before the revolutions that shook central-eastern Europe, he founded

8010-482: 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

8100-511: 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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