Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930 to 2004) was a philosopher, one of the best known and most prolific of the twentieth century. Distancing himself from phenomenology, existentialism and structuralism, which dominated the French intellectual scene, he developed in the mid 1960s a strategy called deconstruction. It is generally presented through close analysis of specific texts and seeks to expose and then subvert the binary oppositions that underlie dominant ways of thinking, such as presence and absence or speech and writing, and so to criticize what he called the metaphysics of presence. Deconstruction has a literary aspect, concerned with textual interpretation, and a philosophical aspect aimed at metaphysics.