Derrida and the Strategy of Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was born in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, to a Sephardic Jewish family, and experienced antisemitic exclusion from school under Vichy-administered Algeria in 1942, an early biographical episode he later connected to his lifelong philosophical preoccupation with exclusion, marginality, and the outside of established systems. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Louis Althusser and others, Derrida published, in a single remarkable year, 1967, the three books that established his reputation: Of Grammatology (De la Grammatologie), Writing and Difference (L'écriture et la différence), and Speech and Phenomena (La voix et le phénomène). Of Grammatology develops Derrida's critique of what he calls "phonocentrism," the traditional Western privileging of spoken language over written language on the assumption that speech offers more direct, unmediated access to a speaker's meaning, a bias Derrida traces from Plato's Phaedrus through Rousseau to Saussure himself, despite Saussure's own explicit demotion of writing as merely secondary to speech.