Jacques Derrida: Cosmopolitan Critic

Abstract

The product of a glorious flowering of post-war French intellectual thought, Derrida’s ideas were an “assemblage,” constructed from a unique synthesis of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Emmanuel Levinas. As such, they spoke to the key issues in the human experience: knowledge, individual identity, consciousness, language, and freedom. In exploring these themes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Derrida proclaimed an uncompromising message. The entire structure of Western language, based upon “four thousand years of linear writing,” was responsible for a deeply entrenched system of psychic and physical “oppression,” a system of tyranny that manifested itself in a “technical and scientific economy” that paid little heed to the spiritual well-being of its members. Calling for a “Nietzschean demolition” of the Western logos, Derrida advocated a far-reaching “deconstruction” of the whole structure of Western language and thought. In practice, however, Derrida’s far-reaching objectives have proved difficult to achieve, “deconstructionism” typically manifesting itself simply as a device for literary or textual criticism. In exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Derrida’s theoretical frameworks, this chapter traces Derrida career and intellectual development from the submission of his thesis on Edmund Husserl in 1954 until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2004.