Derrida, Jacques (1930-2004)

French philosopher who introduced the deconstruction theory into literary criticism. His approach involved looking at how a text is put together in order to reveal its hidden meanings and the assumptions of the author. Derrida's main publications were De la Grammatologie/Of Grammatology (1967) and La Voix et le phénomène/Speech and Writing (1967).

Derrida was born in Algeria. He taught in Paris at the Sorbonne 1960-64 and subsequently at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His analysis of language draws on the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Although obscurely presented, his conclusions have some similarity to those of Anglo-American linguistic philosophers.