Dr. Jacques Derrida — Profile, Specialty, Credentials & Public Visibility

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He made "deconstruction" a word that escaped philosophy departments and infected literary theory, architecture, law, and decades of graduate seminars — then spent years insisting he'd been misread. His writing was famously difficult, his influence undeniable, his critics never short of ammunition.

Biography

About

Born Jackie Élie Derrida on 15 July 1930, he grew into a French philosopher who built deconstruction through close readings of Saussure's linguistics and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Between 1967 and 1972 he published the works that made his name — Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy — texts that redrew debates in ontology, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Over 40 books and hundreds of essays followed, spreading his approach across the humanities and social sciences, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, histori…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

said2003

Amy Kofman: Have you read all the books in here? Derrida: No, only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully.

— Derrida (2003 documentary), referring to his personal library

Jacques Derrida

said1993

Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.

— "Circumfession." In Jacques Derrida, eds. G. Bennington & J. Derrida, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.

Jacques Derrida

said1993

I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.

— "Circumfession." In Jacques Derrida, eds. G. Bennington & J. Derrida, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.

Jacques Derrida

said1982

At the end of Being and Nothingness, ...

— "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French

Jacques Derrida

said1982

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos).

— "The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French

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