Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-) is widely regarded as among the most influential - and controversial - of contemporary French intellectuals. The author of numerous, ground-breaking works on philosophy, literature, and aesthetic theory, he is a founding member of the prestigious College International de Philosophie, and in France he has played a major role in transforming the teaching of philosophy. In the United States, where he has taught regularly since the early seventies, his rigorous and allusive writings have been at the (often volatile) center of critical debates surrounding literary theories of deconstruction and have influenced an entire generation of scholars and students.
Yet Derrida's work has also frequently been attacked as needlessly hermetic and perniciously frivolous. In this clear-headed and critical study, Roland A. Champagne provides a lucid introduction to Derrida's thought for the general, educated reader. He traces Derrida's intellectual formation, from his boyhood as a Sephardic Jew in the educational system of French colonial Algeria, to his training at the Ecole normale superieur in Paris; from his early exchanges with Althusser, Hyppolite, and Foucault, to his widening contemporary influence in American academic circles; from his early studies of the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, to his involvement with speech-act theory, to his abiding preoccupation with the works of Levinas, Jabes, and Celan, with Jewish identity and the political engagement of feminist theory. Professor Champagne remains true to the subtlety of Derrida's arguments (a rarity in the highly polemicized discourse on deconstruction), while at the same time raising the central question of the ethics of Derrida's philosophical practice. Derrida is also known for his neologisms, and readers will find here a helpful glossary of key terms in his philosophy, as well as a wealth of references for those interested in further pursuing these crucial and timely critical issues.

Roland A. Champagne is professor of French at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.