Philosophy

Jacques Derrida

1930 to 2004, El Biar, French Algeria

Deconstruction, differance, and the claim that there is nothing outside the text.

Lessons

Deconstruction and the Metaphysics of Presence

Derrida’s lifelong project began with a diagnosis: Western philosophy, from Plato to Heidegger, secretly rests on a craving for presence - for a fixed centre, an origin, a meaning fully present to itself. Deconstr…

Differance: The Trace and the Deferral of Meaning

Derrida’s most famous coinage is a word you cannot hear: differance , spelled with an a. It names the double movement by which meaning is produced - signs mean only by differing from other signs, and any final, pr…

Speech, Writing, and the Pharmakon

Why has philosophy, from Plato onward, treated writing as a dangerous, second-rate copy of living speech ? Derrida shows that this ancient prejudice - phonocentrism - is the master case of the metaphysics of presence, a…

There Is Nothing Outside the Text

Derrida’s most quoted and most misunderstood line. It does not mean reality is unreal or that only books exist. It means there is no meaning, no experience, no ‘outside’ that reaches us raw, free of al…

Justice, Hospitality, and the Gift

In his later years Derrida turned to ethics and politics, surprising those who thought deconstruction was a nihilist game. He argued that justice itself is undeconstructible - the very thing in whose name we deconstruct…