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Encyclopædia Britannica
Jacques Derrida, (born July 15, 1930, El Biar, Algeria—died October 8, 2004, Paris, France), French philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy and analyses of the nature of language, writing, and meaning were highly controversial yet immensely influential in much of the intellectual world in the late 20th century.
Aspects of the topic Jacques Derrida are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
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American literature (in American literature: Theory)
...academic critics, who preferred theory to close reading. European structuralism found little echo in the United States, but poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida found a welcome in the less-political atmosphere, marked by skepticism and defeat, that followed the 1960s. Four Yale professors joined Derrida to publish a group of essays,...
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continental philosophy (in continental philosophy (European thought): Derrida)
The other major representative of philosophical post-structuralism is Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who burst onto the philosophical scene in 1967 with three important publications: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. Unlike Foucault, who was chiefly concerned with the relationship between the humanistic disciplines and...
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deconstruction (in deconstruction (criticism);
form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man,...
in Western philosophy: Recent trends )The movement known as deconstruction, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), displayed a similar hostility to metaphysics and its quest for totality and absolute truth. Under the sway of Heidegger’s call for “a destruction of the history of ontology,” Derrida endorsed the deconstruction of Western...
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epistemology (in epistemology (philosophy): Continental epistemology)
...to demonstrate that all concepts are historically conditioned and that many of the most important ones serve the political function of controlling people rather than any purely cognitive purpose. Jacques Derrida has claimed that all dualisms are value-laden and indefensible. His technique of deconstruction aimed to show that every philosophical dichotomy is incoherent, because whatever can be...
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French culture (in French literature: Derrida and other theorists)
The philosopher Jacques Derrida (L’Écriture et la différance [1967; Writing and Difference]) contributed to the contemporary cult of uncertainty with his poststructuralist project to “deconstruct” the binary structures of thinking on which Western culture appeared to be based and to expose the hierarchies of power...
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intellectual history (in historiography: Intellectual history)
...been to interpret past texts; the intentions of the author, as revealed in those texts, set limits to possible interpretations even where they do not mandate a single one. Deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida assert that the intentions of the author can never be known and would be irrelevant even if they could be. All that an interpreter has is the text—thus, Michel Foucault, drawing...
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phenomenology (in phenomenology (philosophy): In France)
...und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental Logic), pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, combined phenomenology and structuralism in his interpretation of literature.
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postmodernism (in political philosophy: Foucault and postmodernism;
A skepticism of a more thoroughgoing and exuberant kind was expressed in the writings of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). He maintained that any attempt to establish a conclusion by rational means ultimately “deconstructs,” or logically undermines, itself. Because any text can be interpreted in an indefinite number of ways, the search for the “correct” interpretation...
in postmodernism (philosophy): Postmodernism and modern philosophy )...and moral and intellectual values of the community or tradition in which they are used. The postmodern view of language and discourse is due largely to the French philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the originator and leading practitioner of deconstruction.
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Yale school (in Yale school (American literary critics))
The Yale school’s skeptical, relativistic brand of criticism drew inspiration from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Its most prominent members were Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller. De Man, a professor of comparative literature and author of Blindness & Insight (1971; 2nd ed., rev. 1983) and Allegories of Reading (1979), was...
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Articles from Britannica encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
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Jacques Derrida - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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(1930-2004). Philosopher Jacques Derrida is best known for developing deconstruction, a form of philosophical and literary analysis. This approach involves, in part, closely examining the language and logic of a written work, revealing its underlying assumptions, and showing how contradictions within the text itself undermine those assumptions. Derrida challenged the basic oppositions in texts of Western philosophy between pairs of concepts-such as mind and body or nature and culture-in which one is taken to be fundamental and the other secondary. In many of his essays and books, for example, he critically examined texts in which speech was assumed to be a more authentic form of language than writing. He argued that this opposition of speech and writing is neither natural nor necessary.
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