DERRIDA, JACQUES

born July 15, 1930, El Biar, Alg. French philosopher, whose critique of Western philosophy encompasses literature, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. Derrida studied at the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, where he taught the history of philosophy from 1965. From 1960 to 1964 he taught at the Sorbonne. In 1962 he published his first book, a translation (with a new introduction) of a section of a work on geometry by Edmund Husserl. In 1967 three influential works by him were published: La Voix et le phnomne (Speech and Phenomena), a study of Husserl; and two collections of essays, L'criture et la diffrence (Writing and Difference) and De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology). Three works published in 1972 were Marges de la philosophie (Margins of Philosophy); Positions (a series of interviews); and La Dissmination (Dissemination). Derrida's thought is based on his disapproval of the search for some ultimate metaphysical certainty or source of meaning that has characterized most Western philosophy. In his works he offers a way of reading philosophic texts, called deconstruction, which enables him to make explicit the metaphysical suppositions and a priori assumptions used even by those philosophers who are the most deeply critical of metaphysics. Derrida eschewed the holding of any philosophical doctrine and instead sought to analyze language in an attempt to provide a radical alternative perspective in which the basic notion of a philosophical thesis is called into question. His later works include Glas (1974), La Vrit en peinture (1978; Truth in Painting), La Carte postale (1980; The Post Card), L'Oreille de l'autre (1982; The Ear of the Other), and Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (1987; Psyche: Inventions of the Other).