Jacques Derrida

Derrida grew up in Algeria as a Sephardic Jewish outsider to French culture, and spent his career reading the texts that formed the background of Western philosophy. Deconstruction is not destruction but a practice of close reading that attends to the tensions within a text that the text itself cannot resolve. Every philosophical text establishes a hierarchy of terms — speech over writing, presence over absence, nature over culture — and deconstruction shows how the supposedly subordinate term is necessary for the dominant one. He applied this to Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, and Austin. The result was not nihilism but a permanent alertness to what any account of things has had to exclude. He wrote with deliberate difficulty because he did not trust the clarity that smoothed over these exclusions — and because he believed the form of a philosophical text was never innocent of its content.