This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) tells the story of
a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of
twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French
philosopher in the world - a vulnerable, tormented man who,
throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the
French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds
in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the
microcosm of the ecole Normale Superieure, the cluster of
structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after.
We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers
with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel
Levinas, Jean Genet, and Helene Cixous, among others. We also
witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over
crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jurgen Habermas, as well as several
controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of
which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of
courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela,
illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept -
deconstruction - takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence
way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies,
architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and
postcolonial studies.
In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoit
Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked
with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge
personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his
extensive correspondence. Peeters' book gives us a new and deeper
understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major
philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century.
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