Derrida is now considered one of the most original thinkers, if not the most influential thinker of his time. His development of the idea of deconstruction, his critical reading of classical philosophic texts, and his provocative take on a wide range of issues and topics have influenced scholars in virtually all countries and continents across the humanities, social sciences, philosophy, architectural disciplines, and the arts. Derrida became famous for a new way of reading classical philosophic texts, and indeed a provocative way of reinterpreting the entire history of philosophy. He is regarded as being foremost responsible for the so-called French linguistic turn—with colleagues such as Julia Kristeva (1980) and Hélène Cixous (1976, 1997). Derrida aims to show that meaning is always primarily linguistic, though any pronouncement about his work is bound to be overly simplistic or downright wrong. In his famous text Of Grammatology, he begins a preoccupation with the notion of writing that has somehow governed virtually his entire oeuvre. He has argued that western thought is dominated by logocentrism and that commonly accepted ideas such as immediacy, presence, absence, identity, and proximity are misleading the logic of our thinking or simply untenable. For Derrida language includes the full complexities of human expression and signification: literature, cinema, visual art, sculpture, and so on. His famous claim that there is “nothing outside of the text” refers, on the one hand, to the notion that the meaning of a text can never be fixed (is always different and deferred), and, on the other hand, that this linguistic predicament is symptomatic of every human situation and experience.
In an interview, contained in A Taste for the Secret, Derrida (2001) offers some insights into his life as author, such as his reasons for writing, his initial resistance to being photographed, and so on. The curious reader might ask, but are personal secrets revealed? The title would lead one to expect not. Yet, Derrida shares some inner thoughts. On clarity: “my own experience of writing leads me to think that one does not always write with a desire to be understood—there is a paradoxical desire not to be understood” (2001, p. 30). On school: “even though I have always been in school I was never good at school. I failed a lot of examinations, was held back” (2001, p. 40). On grammar: “I detest grammatical mistakes. Even when I take liberties that some people find provocative, I do so with the feeling—justifiable or not—that I do in fact know the rules. A transgression should always know what it transgresses” (2001, p. 43). On death: “I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there” (2001, p. 88). On afterlife: “I do not believe that one lives on post mortem” (2001, p. 88).
Selected Readings:
Derrida, J. (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). On the Name. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2005). The Politics of Friendship. London: Verso Press.
Derrida, J. and M. Ferraris. (2001). A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.