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An archetypal dissenter, Derrida was born in 1930 to a family of Jews in El-Biar, Algeria. He was barely 10 when Vichy regime overran Algeria with French support, turning him into a trenchant critic of French establishment. After informing him that "French culture is not made for little Jews," his teacher expelled him from school. By 13, the precocious Derrida was already reading Nietzsche and Rousseau, carefully recording their quotations in his personal diary. At 19, he moved to Paris to study philosophy at the `C9cole Normale Superieure, where he read and critiqued Husserl and Heidegger. His critical writings later won him a scholarship to Harvard. On returning to Paris in 1960, he taught philosophy at the Sorbonne. As early as 1970, he had begun to divide his time between Paris and the US where he was invited to lecture at several universities, including John Hopkins and Yale. University of California, Irvine, offered him Professorship in Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature in 1986. Way back in the early 1960s, his translation and critical commentary of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry had already earned him plaudits as an original thinker. His paper Structure, Sign and the Play on the Discourse of the Human Sciences was truly historical as it inaugurated a new phase of ‘post-structuralism’ in literary theory/history. The publication of Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, the following year, only confirmed his stature as a cult-figure of western philosophical discourse. Derrida was of the view that the traditional or metaphysical way of reading made a number of false assumptions about the nature of texts. A traditional reader believed that language was capable of expressing ideas without changing them, that in the hierarchy of language writing was secondary to speech, and that the author of a text was the source of its meaning. Drawing upon psychoanalysis and linguistics, Derrida’s deconstructive style of reading subverted the traditional way of reading the texts and interrogated the assumptions underlying such a reading. As a result, the number of legitimate interpretations of a text coded in the archives of language multiplied manifold. By deconstructing the works of other philosophers and thinkers, Derrida was able to show how language/meaning shift constantly. Although Derrida’s thought is sometimes portrayed by critics as destructive of philosophy, deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims to undermine the logic of opposition within texts. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term: "Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction," however. It is, in fact, much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means, "to undo" — a virtual synonym for de-construct." All his life, Derrida stoutly resisted the label of a ‘skeptic nihilist’ that his detractors imposed upon him. Instead, he saw himself as an activist-theorist, who, over the years, fought for a number of political causes — the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, anti-apartheid, and the rights of Czech Charter 77 dissidents. "I am applied Derrida," he had once put it wryly. Not only did he revolutionise the way we thought about truth, language and meaning, but also provided the wherewithal to change the social reality. Only two years ago, he had confessed to one of his interviewers, "I’m constantly attentive to the time left to me, and although I’ve been inclined this way since I was young, it becomes more serious when you reach 72. So far I haven’t made my peace with the inevitability of death, and I doubt I ever will, and this awareness permeates everything I think. It’s terrible what’s going on in the world, and all these things are on my mind, but they exist alongside this terror of my own death." Well, Jacques, the world shall continue to be as ‘terrible’ as it always is, but we shall definitely miss your ‘derrid/ful’ absence. That you may have ultimately made peace with the ‘inevitability’ or the ‘terror of death’ is hardly a consolation for us. |
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