Jacques Derrida

In 1957, he married psychoanalyst, Marguerite Aucouturier. They had two sons together.

In 1985, he fathered a son from Sylviana Agacinski.

Shortly before his death, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which ultimately took his life. He died on October 9, 2004.

Jacques Elie Derrida was the third of the five children born to Haim Aaron Prosper Charles Derrida and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar in El Biar, French Algeria. He was of Sephardic-Jewish descent.

He was debarred from his lycee (secondary school) on the first day after French officers executed anti-Semitic allocations by the Vichy administration. He avoided school for a year and partook in a number of football competitions instead, as he dreamt of becoming a professional football player.

In his teenage years, he found great solace in the works of philosophers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche and Gide. He completed his master’s degree in Philosophy, following which he received a scholarship to study at Harvard University from 1956 to 1957.

From 1957 to 1959, he taught the English language and the French to the children of soldiers, in lieu military service. The next year, he was appointed to teach philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he also worked as an assistant to Suzanne Bachelard.

He began to teach permanently at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1964; a position he kept for the next twenty years.

He became linked with a group of intellectuals and philosophical theorists who were collectively known as ‘Tel Quel’. On October 21, 1966, he presented a lecture at John Hopkins University titled ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. This shot him to worldwide prominence.

He printed the first of his three books, ‘Writing and Difference’ in 1967. The same year, he published ‘Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs’ and his best-known work ‘Of Grammatology’.

He continued to produce a number of significant works such as ‘Glas’, in 1974 and ‘The Post Card: From Socrates to Frued and Beyond’, six years later. During this time, he was also one of the intelligentsias who signed the requisition ‘against age of consent laws’.

Derrida published three books in 1967 that charted this important philosophical ideology. The book are: ‘Speech and Phenomena’, ‘Of Grammatology’ and ‘Writing and Difference’. In these three books, he investigated and evaluated Western Philosophy. This was by far his most important inputs in philosophy and is also considered some of the best works on Edmund Husserl and the ‘phenomenology’. These three publications collectively established his status and projected him to international prominence.