(1930-) French philosopher who introduced the deconstruction theory into literary criticism. His approach involves looking at how a text is put together in order to reveal its hidden meanings and the assumptions of the author. Derrida’s main publications are De la Grammatologie/Of Grammatology 1967 and La Voix et le phénomčne/Speech and Writing 1967.
Derrida was born in Algeria. He taught in Paris at the Sorbonne 1960–64 and subsequently at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His analysis of language draws on the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Although obscurely presented, his conclusions have some similarity to those of Anglo-American linguistic philosophers.