Thinkers Timeline

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He is best known for a way of reading texts called deconstruction. He was born on 15 July 1930 in El-Biar, a small town near Algiers, in what was then French Algeria. His family was Sephardic Jewish. They had lived in Algeria for many generations. French was the language spoken at home. In 1942, when Derrida was twelve, his life changed. The Vichy government in France had passed anti-Jewish laws. These laws reached Algeria too. On the first day of school that year, he was told he could not come back. He was sent away because he was Jewish. He did not attend school for a whole year. He later said this moment marked him for life. After the war, he returned to school. He read hungrily. He discovered Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Sartre. In 1949 he moved to Paris. After two tries, he got into the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. This is France's top university for philosophy. He met great teachers and students there. He also met his future wife, Marguerite. He published his first major books in 1967. There were three of them in one year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. These books made him famous, first in France and then around the world. He taught in Paris and at many universities in the United States. He wrote more than forty books in total. He died on 9 October 2004 of pancreatic cancer, aged 74.