Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), French-Algerian philosopher, whose work originated the school of deconstruction, a strategy of analysis that has been applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law, and architecture. Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria. In 1952 he began studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he later taught from 1965 to 1984. From 1960 to 1964 he taught at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Derrida’s first work, L’Origine de la Géométrie (1962; Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 1978), was an introduction to his translation of a 1936 paper by Edmund Husserl, in which Derrida examined the principles of Husserl’s theses. In 1967 he published three books—La Voix et la Phénomène (Speech and Phenomena, 1973), De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology, 1977), and L’Écriture et la Différence (Writing and Difference, 1978)—that introduced the deconstructive approach to reading texts. Derrida resisted being classified, and his later works continued to redefine his thought.

From the early 1970s, Derrida divided much of his time between Paris and the United States, where he taught at such universities as Johns Hopkins, Yale, and the University of California at Irvine. His other works include Glas (1974) and The Post Card (1980).

Derrida’s work focused on language. He contended that the traditional, or metaphysical, way of reading makes a number of false assumptions about the nature of texts. A traditional reader believes that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing them, that in the hierarchy of language writing is secondary to speech, and that the author of a text is the source of its meaning. Derrida’s deconstructive style of reading subverted these assumptions and challenged the idea that a text has an unchanging, unified meaning.

The persistence of logocentricism in Western philosophy, the importance of speech as opposed to writing, and the emphasis on the signified as opposed to the signifier were at the heart of Derrida’s work. Drawing on psychoanalysis and linguistics, Derrida questioned this approach. As a result, he insisted, the author’s intentions in speaking cannot be unconditionally accepted. This multiplies the number of legitimate interpretations of a text.

Deconstruction shows the multiple layers of meaning at work in language. By deconstructing the works of previous scholars, Derrida attempted to show that language is constantly shifting. Although his thought is sometimes portrayed by critics as destructive of philosophy, deconstruction can be better understood as showing the unavoidable tensions between the ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy and the inevitable shortcomings that accompany its production.