Biography and Bibliography of Jacques Derrida
Compiled by Scott David Foutz

Biography

Born 15 July 1930, in Algiers

During his youth he concentrated on playing competitive sports and reading the works of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Andre Gide, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Valery, and Albert Camus.

After failing his baccalaureat in June 1947, he studied the works of Henri Bergson and Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycee Gauthier in Algers.

He passed the baccalaureat in June 1948 and began reading the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger at the Lycee Bugeaud in Algiers.

Spent 1949 in Paris as a boarding student at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, where he read the works of Simone Weil.

After twice failing the entrance exam to the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris, he was admitted in 1952, where he dabbled in psychology and ethnology, and became an intermittent militant in non-Communist far-left groups.

In 1955 he failed the oral portion of the philosophy agregation, an examination that qualifies candidates for lifelong tenure in a teaching job at a state school.

In 1956 he passed the oral exam and received a grant as a special auditor at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he began translating Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry into French. For his introduction to this book (published 1962) Derrida was awarded the Jean Cavailles Prize in modern epistemology.

From 1957 to 1959 he taught French and English in a school in Kolea, near Algiers, to children of soldiers in the Algerian war for independence.

In 1960 he began teaching philosophy and logic at the University of Paris, and published essays in the journals Critique and Tel Quel.

Soon after, he took the post of maitre-assistant at the Ecole Normal Superiure, where he taught until 1984.

In 1966 Derrida made his debut among American intellectuals at a conference at John Hopkins University where he announced the death of French structuralism with his paper "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". (This paper is now included in Writing and Difference.)

In 1967, Derrida published three books:

Writing and Difference,

Of Grammatology.

"Of Grammatology is the title of a question: a question about the necessity of a science of writing, about the conditions that would make it possible, about the critical work that would have to open its field and resolve the epistemological obstacles; but it is also a question about the limits of this science." (Positions, 13)

Speech and Phenomena.

"In [Speech...] is posed... the question of the privilege of voice and of phonetic writing in their relation to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics, and metaphysics in its most modern, critical, and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology." (Positions, 5)

In 1972 Derrida published three more books:

Dissemination. A collection of four essays which examines (a) the nature of prefaces, (b) Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates discusses the origin of writing, (c) mimesis, or the representation of representation, and (d) the binary and trinitarian thought patterns of Western philosophy.

Margins of Philosophy. A collection of ten essays, said to contain Derrida's best and most philosophical writings.

Positions. A collection of three separate interviews with Derrida.

In 1974, Glas is published, which launches Derrida's popularity among American literary critics, including Geofferey Hartman of the Yale school

The Truth in Painting is published in 1978, applying deconstruction to art, psychology and politics.

In 1980 The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond is published, and focuses on the relation of speech and writing, with a reinterpretation of Freud's depth psychology.

Derrida published Memoires: for Paul de Man in 1986. A storm of criticism against deconstructionism followed when 180 pro-Nazi articles written by de Man were found. By association and failure to adequately criticize de Man, Derrida was accused of condoning de Man's anti-Semitism.

In 1987 Derrida published Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, in which he also ponders, though without condemnation, Heidegger's relationship to Nazism.

Throughout the 1970's and 1980's Derrida conducted yearly seminars as a visiting professor of the humantities at such universities as Yale, UC Irvine and Cornell. He holds honorary degrees from Columbia University, the University of Essex, the New School for Social Research, and Williams College. In 1992, Derrida was given an honorary degree from Cambridge University.

He is currently the director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and lives in a suburb south of Paris with his wife of thirty-six years. He has two sons.

Bibliography

Biographical References

Bennington, Geofferey and Derrida, Jacques. Jacques Derrida. (1993)

International Who's Who, 1991-1992.

Graham, Judith, ed. Current Biography Yearbook, 1993.

Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. (1991)

Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. (1985)

Norris, Christopher. Derrida. (1987)

Translated works

"Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, pp. 247-72. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1970. Reprinted in Writing and Difference.

Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

"The Purveyor of Truth." Translated by Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron, and Marie Rose-Logan. Yale French Studies, no. 52 (1975): 31-113. French Text in La Carte postale.

Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1976. (De la grammatalogie. Paris: Minuit, 1976.)

"Fors." Translated by Barbara Johnson. Georgia Review 31 (Spring 1977): 64-116. (French text published as the introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Le Verbier de l'homme aux loups [Anasemeis I]. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976.)

"Limited Inc abc..." Translated by Samuel Weber. Glyph 2, pp. 162-254. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1977. (French text issued as supplement to Glyph 2.)

"The Retrait of Metaphor." Enclitic 2 (Fall 1978): 5-33. (French publication in Poesie 7 [1978].)

Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

"Living On/Border Lines." Translated by James Hulbert. In Deconstructionism and Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al., pp. 75-176. New York: Seabury Press, 1979.

"Me - Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of 'The Shell and the Kernel' by Nicolas Abraham." Translated by Richard Klein. Diacritics 9 (Spring 1979): 4-12.

Spurs/Eperons. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (La Dissemination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.)

Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (Positions. Paris: Minuit, 1972.)

Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1982. (Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972.)

"The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin. In Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore, pp. 34-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Signeponge/Signsponge. Translated by Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Untranslated works

Glas. Paris: Galilee, 1974.

"Economimesis." In Mimesis desarticulations, by Sylviane Agacinski et al., pp. 57-93. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975.

"Entre crochets." Digraphe 8 (April 1976): 97-114.

"Ou commence et comment finit uns corps enseignant?" In Politiques de la philosophie, edited by Dominique Grisoni, pp. 60-89. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976.

"Pas." Gramma: Lire Blanchot I 3-4 (1976): 111-215.

"L'Age de Hegel." In GREPH. Qui a peur de la philosophie?, pp. 73-107. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.

"Ja, ou le faux-bond." Digraphe 11 (March 1977): 83-121.

La Verite en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.

La Carte postale: de Socrates a Freud et au-dela. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980. Partial translations of the essay "Speculer - sur Freud" have appeared before. As (1) "Speculations - on Freud." Translated by Ian McLeod. Oxford Literary Review 3 (1978): 78-97. As (2) "Coming Into One's Own." Translated by James Hulbert. In Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, edited by Geoffrey Hartman, pp. 114-48. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1978.

Helpful Secondary Sources

Clark, Timothy. Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's notion and practice of literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Melville. Stephen W. Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986.

Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Methuen, 1982.