Jacques Derrida · Philosophy
Derrida’s lifelong project began with a diagnosis: Western philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger, secretly rests on a craving for <em>presence</em> - for a fixed centre, an origin, a meaning fully present to itself. Deconstruction is the patient reading that shows how every such centre quietly depends on what it tries to exclude.
You learned that for Derrida, the Western tradition is governed by a metaphysics of presence : it organizes thought around hierarchies (speech over writing, presence over absence, nature over culture) in which one term is treated as primary and the other as a mere fall from it. Deconstruction shows that the ‘sec…
Leads to Heidegger.
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