Name: PHILOSOPHY: Jacques Derrida
Uploaded: 2017-11-07T09:55:32.000Z
Duration: 9 min 41 s
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Jacques Derrida was one of the most famous, controversial,

but also wise figures in recent French intellectual life.

He invented a way of doing philosophy that he called

Deconstruction, which fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields,

Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, in what was then French colonial Algeria.

His family were jews, his father a salesman for a local wine firm.

He was initially slow at school and harbored dreams of becoming a professional soccer player.

In 1942, under new laws enacted by the collaborationist French Vichy regime,

Derrida, like all other Jewish children, was forcibly excluded from his Lycée

and spent a lot of his time at home with his mother.

He suffered greatly from the anti-semitism of Algeria's majority Muslim population

and was deeply marked by the experience of having been in an inferior position

at the nexus of three different religions:

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which claimed to speak the truth

none of which knew how to treat the others with particular respect.

In 1949, just turned 19, Derrida traveled to Paris to take up a place at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure.

He was a Brilliant student, but in an odd position.

but utterly at the margins in Metropolitan France in his status as an Algerian jew.

Though Derrida was not an autobiographical writer,

It's hard not to read his work as a highly abstract response to his first-hand knowledge of bigotry

It was from the late 1960s onwards the Derrida began to develop the ideas that made his name.

In time he became a celebrity intellectual around Europe and America.

He was hugely glamorous. A good-looking man with great taste in raincoats and haircuts.

He had a rich, diverse and complex love life.

In 1980 he was arrested on a wholy full drug smuggling charge, but was supported by the French president and

He loved playing snooker and devoted most of his afternoons to the game,

He died in 2004 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74

Derrida wrote 40 books, all of them abstruse and subtle.

But his importance for us can be revealed by examining three initially odd sounding terms he often used:

Behind the High-flown vocabulary, lie some crucially important ideas.

Deconstruction is the word most commonly associated with Derrida.

He used it to describe the way he went about thinking,

though when other people started using this term he quite often felt

they'd misunderstood what he meant by it.

Essencialy, Deconstruction means dismantling our excessive loyalty to any idea

and learning to see the aspects of the truth that might lie buried in its opposite.

It was in 1967 that Derrida published his first major book: "Of Grammatology".

Its overt topic is admittedly rather strange, even tedious.

Derrida was convinced that western philosophers since Socrates

had systematically privileged speech, which was seen as authentic communication,

over writing, which was regarded as a mere transcript of what people might say,

a secondhand report lacking the interaction and truthfulness that comes with conversation.

In itself this hardly feels like an urgent issue

But the drama of Derrida's work came from the bigger idea he developed from this claim.

His overarching ambition was to advance a vast troubling proposition.

But once we begin to examine it closely, almost all our thinking is riddled with a false,

that is unjustified and unhelpful, privileging of one thing over another.

men, at least for long periods, over women,

Derrida score point was that this privileging involves a failure to see the merits and value

of the supposedly lesser part of the equation

Derrida was not so much making the nihilistic point that everything is worthless.

counterparts in some of our key oppositions are worthy of love and a attention.

Over his 40 books, Derrida deconstructed a range of key binary terms.

Reason vs passion, masculinity vs femininity, profit vs generosity, high culture vs low culture.

His hope was that we could learn to live more ntelligently

with some of the conflicts that lay beneath these terms,

that we could come to see that both sides were on to something,

that both were a bit wrong, that both needed each other, and that the tension between

would by necessity always prove irrevocable.

It might look as if Derrida was always using Deconstruction to attack tradition

and the free market and to promote a left-wing egalitarian agenda,

but it was a great deal more subtle than this.

For example in his deconstruction of the idea of equality,

Derrida proposed that the assertion that equality is always better than inequality,

though this might be a modern liberal axiom, is, in fact,

unstable and obscure, and he pointed out that some of the best human situations

we know are obviously not examples of equality in action.

wrote beautifully and at length about the relationship between pupils and teachers

To deconstruct an idea is to show that it's confused and riddled with logical defects

and that we must keep its messiness constantly in mind.

Derrida was criticizing our tendency to imagine that behind every problem

We offer him creatures destined to live our lives without clear answers,

and that the craving for them is at the root of our troubles.

He wanted to cure us of our love of crude simplicity

and to make us more comfortable with a permanently oscillating nature of wisdom.

For instance, he argued that we might be rightly confused about the merits of Capitalism and Socialism,

or the relationship between love and sex, but that we should never rush to conclusions around these topics

There are useful things to be said on both sides of these equations.

To conclude that capitalism is either splendid or sinful, or that love and sex are either

very closely linked or have nothing much to do with one another

is to avoid grappling with a fraud and kaleidoscopic nature of reality.

Being confused and uncertain around such concepts

Isn't a sign of weakness or stupidity. It is for Derrida the central mark of maturity.

Derrida's tactic was to glamorize this condition and to give it a positive ring,

which is why he brought back into use a beautiful Greek word:

Subtitles ListPlay Video

PHILOSOPHY: Jacques Derrida

privilege

subtle

instance

crave