Jacques Derrida

Timothy Clark (University of Durham)
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Jacques Derrida is the best-known contemporary French thinker, writer, and literary, cultural and political theorist. While primarily working on the unstable borders of philosophical thinking, Derrida became the most decisive influence upon literary criticism during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Of Jewish descent, he was born Jackie Derrida in El-Biar, Algeria on 15th July 1930, Algeria being a colony of France at this time. His education was to be disrupted by the Second World War, with exclusion from school in 1942 due to the Vichy government's anti-Semitism. After Algerian independence in the early 1960s, along with many other

pied-noirs

(a derogative term used by metropolitan France to describe colonial families of French descent), the Derrida family was finally to move…

2699 words

Citation: Clark, Timothy. "Jacques Derrida". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 October 2002; last revised 25 February 2004. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5196, accessed 31 October 2024.]

5196 Jacques Derrida 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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