JACQUES DERRIDA

In the 20th century, one of the most obvious divisions in thought was the chasm between Continental and English-speaking thinkers.

Continental thinkers descended from Hegel, Marx and neo-Kantianism. They were affected by Husserl's phenomenology and the succeeding work of Heidegger and Sartre. Anglo-American thinkers, by contrast, while proceeding from Hegel, were influenced by Thomas Dewey and William James and Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the development of the philosophy of science by the positivists and such figures as Peirce.

French thinker Jacques Derrida (1930-     ) had therefore a prestigious, if controversial, position among the Continental thinkers of the late 20th century. As one of the sophisticated French postmarxist thinkers who appeared to be fascinated by paradoxes and to construct his philosophy in them, he infuriated many of the more provincial English-speaking thinkers. To them, like his countryman the egregious Jean Baudrillard, he seemed constantly to contradict both himself and reason, and thus to speak a chain of contradictions and blithering nonsense.

But, as in so many French thinkers, within the confrontational seeming absurdities of Derrida there seemed to lurk ideas worth considering, once one got past the hermeneutic problems involved in interpreting just what he meant.

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Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930. He came to Paris to get his advanced education, and eventually became a teacher at the . For Derrida, his miraculous year was 1967, when the publication of three of his books made him famous.

These were Dissemination, .

In these books Derrida analyzed certain texts. He claimed to discover, and made a case for, his belief that correct interpretation of texts was fundamentally impossible. In this he carried on the thinking of Roland Barthes (193-1980), the Parisian professor of literature. Barthes had dwelt, first in his book Mythologies (1960), with interpreting texts for their implied content and atmosphere. Then Barthes had gone on to analyze a few classic texts and what he called the fashion system.

Barthes, like Derrida was in the wake not only of Marx but also of the revolution in linguistics and culture created by the posthumously published writings of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure's writings transformed linguistics, and, in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (19-), anthropology as well. Levi-Strauss's application of Saussure's ideas of difference and structure led to the ideas explicitly endorsed by Levi-Strass as structuralism.

Barthes too had been affected by structuralism. He had applied anthropological structuralism to the analysis of literary texts and, later, other "systems." He is thought, in his later works, to make the transition to what has been called poststructuralism.

So Derrida's analysis of texts was completely in this line.

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[To Be Continued and Revised]

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Last modified: 8:54 AM 07/06/2003