Derrida (ePub)

This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) tells the
story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age
of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French
philosopher in the world - a vulnerable, tormented man who,
throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the
French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds
in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the
microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster of
structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after.
We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers
with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel
Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We
also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought
over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several
controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of
which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of
courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela,
illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept
- deconstruction - takes wing and exerts an
extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on
literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer
theory, and postcolonial studies.

In writing this compelling and authoritative biography,
Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew
and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make
use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his
life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters' book
gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps
be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the
twentieth century.