October 9: Jacques Derrida

French philosopher Jacques Derrida died on this date in 2004. Born into a Sephardic family in Algeria in 1930, he was barred from his lycee at age 12 because of the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic quota system and began, outside of school, to discover such thinkers as Rousseau, Nietzsche, Gide, Sartre, and Camus. Derrida was having his own impact by the late 1960s with his “deconstruction” philosophy, which saw all knowledge as defined by context and terms of discourse and examined every text to expose its deeply hidden, culturally-based presuppositions and biases. His philosophy strengthened multiculturalism in academia, worldwide, and infuriated conservatives who were intent on preserving a sense of Western cultural superiority. Derrida was a prolific writer and a public intellectual who had huge impact upon the humanities, especially in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, and he exercised his influence in opposition to South African apartheid, to the Vietnam War, to the dangers of nuclear war, and to the death penalty.

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.” --Jacques Derrida