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Introduction

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural – or structuralist – thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term ‘event’ anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks.

On 21 October 1966, a little-known thirty-six-year-old French philosophy teacher took to the stage at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to deliver a paper titled ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’.

The symposium, portentously titled ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, had been running for three days, and was a huge intellectual event, bringing together over a hundred philosophers, literary critics, ethnographers, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and other cultural theorists from eight countries. Speakers included Roland Barthes, Jean Hyppolite, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Northrop Frye, Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Lacan, while the attendees included future intellectual stars such as Paul de Man and Joseph Hillis Miller. Of the pre-eminent names in structuralism, only Michel Foucault was absent.

The symposium was organised to introduce structuralism to America. Structuralism was rapidly replacing the existentialism of Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir as the dominant philosophical trend in France. Taking its lead from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and underpinned by Freud and Marx, structuralism rejected human-centred philosophy. Instead, it proposed that all elements of human culture, and all phenomena of human life, could only be understood as being part of a ‘structure’, and any explanation of motives, actions and behaviour had to overcome the illusion of a free subject. Everything could only be explained by its interrelationship to other parts of the scheme.

These insights were applied across a range of disciplines. In literature, structuralism moved away from the model of authorial intention – the work as a creation of a single mind which knew what it was doing during the creative process and which produced a work whose effect corresponded, more or less, with ‘what the author was trying to do’ – to a model which saw the meaning of a work as being produced by its place within a system of shared narrative techniques, shared tropes, shared conventions and assumed worldviews. Meaning is produced by the work’s place in a genre (or outside of one), by the circumstances of its production and by the social (and intellectual and cultural) position of the reader.

Derrida had only been invited to the conference at the last moment, after the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch was unable to attend. He came on the recommendation of the director of the École normale supérieure, Jean Hyppolite, who provided what was hardly a ringing endorsement. ‘I think’, said Hyppolite, ‘he would be somebody who would come.’¹

Derrida was the final speaker on the final day. He remained a silent observer for much of the symposium. He looked on as Lacan rose to his feet with obscure questions at the end of each lecture, and as Barthes gently asked for clarification on various moot points. Eventually, however, Derrida, unused to speaking to large audiences, took to the stage, quietly shuffled his notes, and began, ‘Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event”…’ He spoke for less than half an hour. But by the time he was finished the entire structuralist project was in doubt, if not dead. An event had occurred: the birth of deconstruction.

Any biography of Derrida must, as a sort of contractual obligation to his thinking, foreground its caveats. Some are the caveats that any biography must include: an attempt to present a version of an individual’s life and thought, whether one’s own or that of someone else’s, must by definition be partial, selective. Such an undertaking forms a narrative that could be told otherwise and that, presented in the form of a book with a beginning, middle and end, uses the structures of literature to present an object – a life – which is not ipso facto propitious to literary form, nor has any essential reason to mirror its tropes. The writer and the reader make a compact with each other – sign a contract of sorts – to ignore this deceit as much as possible, as the readers of fiction suspend their disbelief in order to care about the characters.

That Derrida explicitly problematised what we call biography makes the need for these caveats even more pressing. His analyses of proper names, the signature, hospitality, autobiography and, ultimately, the act of writing itself means that any declarative sentence is under suspicion, let alone any declarations about another human being. Access to the real is always already a ‘representation’, and all language is rhetorical rather than denotative.

The problem intensifies in an intellectual biography that, as part of its raison d’être seeks to identify and explicate the ‘key concepts’ or the ‘fundamental ideas’ of a particular thinker. Derrida’s key concept or fundamental idea is to – and here one immediately searches verbs that are not emphatic – reject (‘reject’), disorder (‘disorder’), complicate (‘complicate’) or, to put it another way, to deconstruct (‘deconstruct’) what we mean by ‘key concepts’ and ‘fundamental ideas’. As Derrida himself wrote, ‘once quotation marks demand to appear, they don’t know when to stop.’²

This can lead to a kind of panicked rush of obfuscation. Derrida’s insistence on the equivocal, the ambiguous and the conditional renders unequivocal, unambiguous and unconditional statements instantly suspicious. The temptation to mimic Derrida’s own gnomic, allusive and elusive language can be overwhelming.

To ‘do’ deconstruction is indeed to start from the position that any emphatic statement carries within it a cultural, lexical and political history that reinforces (engenders, instigates, propagates) what Derrida called the metaphysics of presence, the existence of the transcendental signifier into which we can plant our flag of meaning. It is a genuine problem, a genuine insight – but obeying its demands can also lead to genuine rubbish.

Indeed part of the difficulty of approaching Derrida for the first time can be reading the secondary texts that cluster around him, worrying out the implications of his thought in a sort of hermeneutic magic circle. Many of these texts end up talking to themselves in a sub-Derridean word salad – full of puns, neologisms, scare quotes, parentheses, footnotes and clubbable jokes, none of which Derrida was averse to himself (he was just better at it).

So a choice must be made between speaking, as it were, in the voice of Derrida’s thought, or not. Neither option will necessarily result in a ‘truer’ version of Derrida or his thought. And neither option will, necessarily, get closer to the man named ‘Jacques Derrida’ and the concepts he sought to elucidate and interrogate. One option will, however, be easier to read. As Derrida himself put it, in one of his more laconic utterances, ‘ordinary language is probably right.’³

This biography aims to set out the intellectual development of Jacques Derrida; to situate it in events both private and public; and to argue for its importance as an event in the history of philosophy and of thought more generally. It will argue that Derrida is one of the great philosophers of this or any age; that his thinking is a crucial component of any future philosophy; that his thinking is immediately – always already – applicable to the world as we find it; and that this application has political heft.

In doing so, I approach Derrida as philosopher. The Anglo-phone world has tended to elide this fundamental fact about his thinking. Whatever form his writings took, whichever discipline took him up or he took up himself, he was a philosopher first and foremost. Thus the first half of the book concentrates on his development and the development of his ideas – from the student and junior teacher from Algeria with his interest in Sartre, Joyce and Camus (among others); to the philosophy student carrying out an intense reading of Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas; and then on to the newly published lecturer at the École normale supérieure who felt, tentatively, and then with a growing sense of excitement and nervousness, that he had found an aporia – a break, an unresolvable contradiction – in Husserl. And that this aporia, this unresolvable contradiction was not Husserl’s, but belonged to the whole history of Western metaphysics, an insight about the nature of all of philosophy from Plato to the present day.

Deconstruction is, as we shall see, born with Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s ‘now’ – that originary moment, that imaginary vantage point, where one can carry out a phenomenological description of the world as though time does not exist (nor, therefore, history). Husserl relies on this ‘now’ to generate his philosophy and to set its limits, but the concept ‘now’ is itself assumed, unquestioned. For Derrida this is an example, par excellence, of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ – the unexamined assumption and therefore privileging of the notion that consciousness is fully present, that the world is fully present, and that we can analyse it with concepts which are fully present and that, in some sense, exist as things. Metaphysics privileges presence over absence. This is one of the binary oppositions which sustain metaphysics, and metaphysics is

the enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.⁴

The task of deconstruction is to examine these binary oppositions in which the first term is privileged – good/evil, positive/negative, pure/impure, simple/complex, essential/accidental, imitated/imitation (as well as speech/writing, man/woman, light/darkness, white/non-white, Western/Oriental) – to problematise them, uncover their fabrication, and analyse the violence that this initiates and sustains.

Derrida argues that

an opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination. Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to neutralisation: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practise an overturning of the classical opposition, and a general displacement of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of intervening in the field of oppositions it criticises.⁵

To do our own sort of justice to this position requires a patient and in some sense radical reading – the coherence of Derrida’s thinking, from his earliest works through to his last is remarkable. It requires that our attention be directed towards the foundational texts, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel. While structuralism furnished Derrida with an immediate field of enquiry, any philosophical theory would have done so.

Far from being the slippery and slick operator that his detractors have attempted to paint him as, Derrida doggedly explored the implications of his fundamental insight across disciplines – literature, feminism, (post-)colonialism, law, psychoanalysis, politics, film theory, theology, even architecture, friendship, gift-giving and hospitality – and did so with rigour and logic. From his first writings on religious mysteries to his final works on animals and animality, Derrida displays a meticulous consistency of thought and method. While this leads him into areas presumably unthought of by the nascent phenomenologist he started as, bugged by a small section on writing in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, it seldom led him to contradict himself or recant. As he himself wrote, ‘Whether it’s my luck or my naiveté, I don’t think I have ever repudiated anything.’⁶

That his writings are abstruse is an effect of his philosophy. His thought generates his style just as Wittgenstein’s generated aphorisms, Spinoza’s numbered propositions, Heidegger’s compound neologisms and Plato’s dialogue. There is nothing fake here. As Geoffrey Bennington puts it, ‘Derrida’s work has often been received as a virtuoso and sophisticated manipulation of paradoxes and puns, which takes an evil pleasure in mocking a whole metaphysical tradition, leading to a nihilism which paralyses thought and action or, at best, to an “artistic” practice of philosophy and literary aestheticism’⁷ as opposed to analytic philosophy which ‘asks and resolves serious problems in short, clear and clean articles without getting lost in these quotations and commentaries, and it can pride itself in real understanding without making a fuss about it.’⁸ But the style of analytic philosophy, privileging clarity as though it was a transparent deliverer or meaning, is itself, as Derrida would argue, a style.

When I studied philosophy in the 1990s, in what one might call an outpost of the mainstream of Western metaphysics, Melbourne, Australia, the two main universities differed in their emphasis between ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. The latter was the domain of the moody, dreamlike Heideggerians, whose idea of a good time was to screen the film The Ister at lunchtime and think about Hölderlin, and then gather with the purple-haired overall-wearing Merleau-Ponty brigade (with their ‘chiasms’, ‘folds’ and long meditations on what it means when a hand touches another hand) and the Foucauldians, sniffing out power everywhere and generally messing up student politics. All of which was much more interesting, I felt, rightly or wrongly, than having the Principia Mathematica explained to me by a professor telling the same jokes as he had, by his own admission, been telling on the day of the moon landing.

But this either/or was not just a consumer choice between flavours of philosophy. It was, for one side at least, a war, and it was a conflict affecting all of Western philosophy. In May 1992, eighteen academics drawn from Mannheim to Florence, Los Angeles to Cracow wrote an open letter to The Times against the proposal that Derrida receive an honorary degree at Cambridge University, arguing that while Derrida ‘describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of that discipline’, his work ‘does not meet accepted standards of quality and rigour’ and that ‘M. Derrida … seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or the concrete poets’.⁹ One of the signatories, the philosopher David Hugh Mellor, later pro-vice-chancellor of Cambridge, was moved to say, ‘I’m sure Derrida himself doesn’t believe most of the nonsense he is famous for, but if you filter that out, the rest doesn’t add up to anything worthy of an honorary degree.’¹⁰

The disdain did not dissipate even on his death. While the French president Jacques Chirac was eulogising ‘one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,’ the New York Times obituary, under the headline ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’ described deconstruction, of which Derrida was ‘the father’ (a designation which would have amused him no end) as ‘murky’ and ‘undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education’, and his prose as being ‘turgid and baffling’. It quoted lovingly from a number of Derrida’s detractors, including Malcolm Bradbury’s bon mot that ‘Literature, the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons.’

More recently Derrida has been lumped in with postmodernists in a discourse where ‘postmodernist’ means those who argue that there is no such thing as truth and who, in the more extreme versions, are responsible for the collapse of society, owing to their espousal of radical indeterminism (a word that does not exist in Derrida’s corpus, except where he rejects accusations of it), which has led either to a liberalism that cannot accept any grand narratives or an authoritarianism that feels no obligation towards any fundamental truths, and which therefore can appeal, straight-faced, to alternative facts.

In this post-truth world, thinkers such as Derrida are seen as anticipating this dangerous relativism or even actually causing it. As astute a political writer as Matthew d’Ancona, in his 2017 book Post Truth, was moved to write that postmodernists, ‘incomprehensible in [their] terminology and intellectual skittishness’, had ‘corroded our concept of truth’. It is, he writes, ‘an arresting reflection that, etched into the long Parisian paragraphs of convoluted, post-modern prose, so often dismissed as indulgent nonsense, was a bleak omen of the political future’.¹¹

Similarly, the cultural critic Michiko Kakutani, author of The Death of Truth, blames ‘academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism’ for the rise of Donald Trump. Meanwhile the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, interviewed in the Guardian in 2017, stated baldly, ‘I think what the post-modernists did was truly evil.’¹² More alarmingly, the 1,500-page manifesto A European Declaration of Independence, written by the Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, cites ‘Derridean deconstruction’ as a tool used by cultural critics to ‘remove traditional meaning and replace it with a new meaning … indoctrinating this new generation in feminist interpretation, Marxist philosophy and the so-called “queer theory”.’

Derrida himself parodied his antagonists in Monolingualism of the Other:

So you ask yourself questions about truth. Well, to that very extent, you do not as yet believe in truth; you are contesting the possibility of truth. That being the case, how do you expect your statements to be taken seriously when they lay a claim to some truth, beginning with your so-called questions? What you are saying is not true because you are questioning truth. Come on! you are a sceptic, a relativist, a nihilist; you are not a serious philosopher! If you continue, you will be placed in a department of rhetoric or literature … You do not believe what you are saying; you want to mislead us.¹³

Derrida’s defenders and advocates have not always been especially helpful either – tending to concentrate their efforts on what might be called the more carnivalesque aspects of his thinking, his disruptive potential, while again ignoring the rigour of his philosophical project. In a sense this is fair enough. One of the more daunting aspects of a diligent reading of Derrida is that his work often appears to assume a thorough working knowledge of most of the history of Western philosophy, as well as vast tranches of non-Western philosophy, Western non-philosophy and non-Western non-philosophy too. For instance the opening section ‘Exergue’ of his influential essay ‘White Mythologies’, which takes as its jumping-off point an obscure chapter in the obscure Anatole France book The Garden of Epicurus, then assures us that to understand the argument requires an ‘examination of the texts of Renan and Nietzsche … as well as those of Freud, Bergson and Lenin … and one should reread the entirety of Mallarmé’s texts on linguistics, aesthetics and political economy’.¹⁴ The footnotes to this paragraph also list Lacan, Jakobson, Benveniste, Althusser, Hegel, Balibar, Marx and Jean-Joseph Goux.

Thus Derrida was no gadfly. He read deeply and intensely, scouring each text for the sorts of inconsistencies, hidden assumptions and breaks in logic which would become the target of deconstruction. It was a way of working he was able to joke about, as when, being interviewed in his extensive and chaotic home library for the 2002 documentary Derrida, he tells the interviewer, ‘I haven’t read all the books that are here … Maybe three or four. But I read those three or four really, really well.’

He also attempted to write really, really well. Having called into question the binary opposition philosophy/literature (also true/false, real/fictional, logical/rhetorical) his work often aspires to the condition of art, and employs many of its strategies, including irony, juxtaposition and hyperbole. While the latter in Derrida does not carry the strategic prominence that it does in, for instance, Nietzsche, Derrida confesses he is ‘an incorrigible hyperbolite. A generalized hyperbolite. In short, I exaggerate. I always exaggerate … hyperbolism [has] invaded my life and work. Everything that proceeds under the name of “deconstruction” arises from it, of course.’¹⁵

Here, then, was a new way of doing philosophy, in a new language. One that, rather than wishing to expel the poets from the polis – as philosophers had from Plato to J. L. Austin – had as part of its grounding notion the position that not only are the barriers between poetic speech and other utterances vague and sometimes meaningless, but that, arguably, poetic speech has a greater access to the particular ‘truth’ at which philosophy has aimed in its narrative. It was, and is, exhilarating stuff. For example, ‘White Mythologies’ opens with:

From philosophy, rhetoric. That is here, to make a volume, approximately, more or less, a flower, to extract a flower, to mount it, or rather to have it mount itself, bring itself to light – and turning away, as if from itself, come round again, such a flower engraves – learning to cultivate, by means of a lapidary’s reckoning, patience.¹⁶

While his seminal early essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ opens like an incantation:

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger – and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death – or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed in the shadow of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future – all these things are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.¹⁷

If philosophy is ‘wandering toward the meaning of its death’, Derrida is teasing out its implications, in a sense of praying over it.

For many outside France, Derrida arrived, as it were, fully formed. Here was an enfant terrible who had declared, notoriously, ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). This was a sentence destined to be ripped from its context by both supporters and antagonists and reduced to a slogan, often held up as proof positive of either the calumnies or daring of postmodern thought. Derrida and ‘that lot’ had declared the author dead, and argued that all is text, that all truth is conditional and that the great narratives should be treated, at best with suspicion, at worst with contempt. To which Derrida would have answered: well, perhaps.

Also, reflecting a bias towards language and logic, most Anglophone introductions to Derrida have tended to start their analyses via linguistics and semiotics. In this version, Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics establishes the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, the word and that which it denotes, and Derrida simply represents what happens when this argument is taken to its logical conclusion – viz all signifiers float free of their putative signifieds such that no transcendental signified can guarantee meaning. We become trapped in a mesh of language (il n’y a pas de hors-texte), where all is relative, contingent, tending towards chaos.

This reading does two things. First, it situates Derrida as simply a logical endpoint to language’s dominance of philosophy in the twentieth century. Someone had to take the thought of Saussure to its logical conclusion, so it may as well be Derrida. The uniqueness and richness of his thought is effaced – anyone could have thought of that. But it also pulls him away from the philosophical discourses that, positively and negatively, were touchstones for a certain generation of French philosophers. These include Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, but also the phenomenology of Husserl and Sartre, Alexandre Kojève’s revolutionary 1933 lectures on Hegel, the battles against and within existentialism as represented by Sartre and Heidegger, debates around communism and Algeria, as well as the influence of thinkers who are less well known outside of France – Georges Canguilhem, Jean Cavaillès and Gabriel Marcel.

The ‘Derrida’ who became something of a cause célèbre in the 1980s had in fact won his ‘fundamental concepts’ through exhaustive philosophical work. For obvious pop cultural reasons, as well as philosophical reasons, this has generally been ignored. In fairness, Derrida played to this crowd. Intellectually demanding French philosophers who at the age of thirty-seven are still slaving away unrecognised on obscure passages of Edmund Husserl concerning the origin of geometry, and of Rousseau’s use of the word ‘supplement’, don’t tend to find themselves, fifteen years later, smoking pipes and being sexy and incomprehensible in major feature films, so why not enjoy?

The Derridean writings of the mid-1970s and early ’80s are his most experimental (again sexy) and autobiographical. While both of these moves are philosophically justifiable in terms of his ‘project’, neither harmed his growing reputation outside the academy. That his work was difficult also, perhaps, helped. It saved the bother of reading him. To be for or against Derrida could thus be a stance, and that position could be projected back onto him by both those who gloried in him and those who excoriated him.

This ambivalence often fed his work. Unlike that other ‘literary philosopher’, Nietzsche, he did not turn his back on the academy, whatever the academy’s attempts to turn its back on him. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘this mingling of respect and disrespect for the academic heritage and tradition in general is legible in everything I do.’¹⁸

For the word ‘academic’, substitute ‘philosophical’. As Husserl had argued ‘to the things themselves’, Derrida’s battle cry might have been ‘to the texts themselves’. Derrida’s achievement is one of reading as much as of writing and, as he puts it, his ‘desire to be faithful to the themes and audacities of a thinking’.¹⁹ His ‘deconstruction’ of the great and sometimes less great works of philosophy, was a form of close reading, as rigorous as that of the New Critics, with whose work his own has parallels. He comes to bury and to praise simultaneously. ‘I love very much everything that I deconstruct,’ he wrote, ‘the texts I want to read from a deconstructive point of view are texts I love.’²⁰

For Derrida, this close reading involved taking philosophers at their word, and looking for where this operation leads to inconsistencies and internal contradictions, not due to the infelicities of the writers themselves, but as an inbuilt feature of language, the impossibility of its coherence. It also involved finding in the work of philosophers the points where it broke down or repressed certain notions in order to frame their position. Thus while the master of the spatial, Husserl, is analysed by the metaphor of the temporal, the great materialist Marx is confronted with the ethereal presence of ‘spirit’ in his work.

By identifying these inconsistencies and contradictions, we are led to explore how the text in question is, indeed, constructed. In part this is a political operation – we ‘analyse historically the formation and layers of its concepts’, ‘carry out a genealogical analysis of a trajectory through which its concepts have been built, used and legitimized’ and ‘analyse the hidden assumptions.’²¹ Deconstruction – which Derrida himself described as ‘an ugly and difficult word’ – is not a method or a tool imposed from outside the text, rather, ‘there is always already deconstruction at work in works.’ Here we can identify, for instance, where power lies, who is signing the cheques. In the Derridean sense, we also uncover logocentrism, phallogocentrism, ethnocentrism, among others.

But it is, crucially, also to seek out that term, or terms, which give the text the illusion of stability, a centre that holds the text in place. The history of Western metaphysics, Derrida argues, is a history of these ‘centres’. He listed such terms in the paper he delivered at Baltimore, as ‘eidos [which he defines as form, essence, type, species], arche [beginning, origin, source], telos [end, purpose, goal], energia [energy, at-work-ness], ousia [essence, existence, substance, subject], alethia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth,’ each taken up by different eras, different philosophers, different systems.

Add to that another ‘centre’ that later became crucial to Derrida: justice. Our system of law is predicated on the existence of justice, as our systems of theology are predicated on the existence of God, and yet neither justice nor God occur within the systems, nor can their existence be guaranteed. They are both, argues Derrida ‘to come’. But this does not refute the system, rather it is the engine of both its survival and its need to adapt. Law will cease to have a function on the arrival of justice, as theology will be made redundant by the arrival of God, and philosophy on the arrival of Truth.

Until such time, there will be deconstruction.

The unknown thirty-six-year-old who rose to speak at Baltimore in 1966 was not yet the father of deconstruction. The boy who grew up in Algeria had thus far failed twice to get into the École normale supérieure, failed the oral examination once there, failed to hand in a thesis, spent a year at Harvard not making any progress, then two years back teaching high school in Algeria as part of his military service, and was lecturing at the ENS under the tutelage of his old teacher Louis Althusser. Married, with one child, his only book consisted of an introduction to Husserl’s On the Origin of Geometry, published five years earlier. While a number of the essays which were to make up his first major contribution, Writing and Difference, had been published, they had received only moderate attention. His lecture series, including ‘Heidegger and the question of Being and history’ and ‘The theory of meaning in [Husserl’s] Logical Investigations and Ideas I’, though esteemed at the academy, were out of step with a philosophy department where bright young Marxist things such as Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey were caught up in the heady excitement surrounding Althusser’s For Marx and the collective Reading Capital, far away from Derrida’s obscure concerns with phenomenology. Both Marxism and structuralism, broadly speaking, regarded phenomenology as theoretically regressive, centred as it was on the ‘subject’, which both discourses were working to overcome.

At the time, Derrida felt he was making little progress, and later described his ‘solitude’ and ‘reclusiveness’.²² ‘I have the impression’, he wrote to Althusser, ‘that I can see pearls out of reach, like a fisherman afraid of the water even though he’s a connoisseur of pearls.’²³ And yet … in part Derrida’s reticence – his fear even – was because he knew he was doing something new.

In 1965 two small articles of his were published in Cahiers pour l’analyse (one of the copious short-lived reviews generated at the time), one on Lévi-Strauss, and one on the Essay on the Origin of Languages by Rousseau. In the same letter to Althusser, he mentioned ‘this little text on writing’ he was working on, which would become ‘Writing before the letter’, which did indeed cause something of a stir on publication in two parts in Critique. This would become the first section in Of Grammatology, and the two smaller pieces were the germ for the rest of the book.

None of this added up to the sort of influence which would even get him invited to a colloquy such as the Baltimore one, let alone point to the possibility that he would overturn the entire philosophy it presumed to celebrate. And yet in less than an hour this is precisely what he did, and the obscure teaching assistant from Algeria was the most talked about philosopher in the world.

Something had just happened. An event, perhaps?