Jacques Derrida, French Father of Deconstructionism, Dies at
74

PARIS (Reuters) — French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
the founder of the school of deconstructionism, has
died of cancer at the age of 74, France Info radio
said on Saturday. It said Algerian-born Derrida had died on Friday of
cancer of the pancreas.

Derrida, who divided his time between France and the
United States, argued that the traditional way we read
texts makes a number of false assumptions and that
they have multiple meanings which even their author
may not have understood.His thinking gave rise to the school of
deconstruction, a method of analysis that has been
applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law
and architecture.

It is heralded as showing the multiple layers of
meaning at work in language, but was described by
critics as nihilistic.

"In him, France gave the world one of the greatest
contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures in
the intellectual life of our time,'' French President
Jacques Chirac said in a statement after learning of
his death.

"Through his work, he sought to find the free
movement which lies at the root of all thinking.''

Born into a Jewish family in El-Biar in Algeria on
July 15, 1930, Derrida began studying philosophy at
the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in 1952 and taught
at Paris's Sorbonne University from 1960 to 1964.

From the early 1970s, Derrida spent much of his time
teaching in the United States, at such universities as
Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of California
at Irvine.

His work focused on language. Challenging the idea
that a text has an unchangeable meaning, Derrida said
the author's intentions cannot be accepted
unconditionally and that this means each text can have
multiple meanings.

His ideas were seen as showing unavoidable tensions
between the ideals of clarity and coherence that
govern philosophy.

He was seen as the inheritor of "anti-philosophy,''
the school of thought of predecessors such as Sigmund
Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Derrida's work was at times controversial. Some staff
at Britain's Cambridge University protested when the
university proposed awarding him an honorary degree in
1992, though he did eventually receive it.

In the early 1980s he was detained when he left his
Prague hotel room for the airport after displeasing
Czechoslovakia's Communist authorities by giving a
lecture on deconstructionist theory.

Derrida was once married to Sylvaine Agacinski, who is
now the wife of former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel
Jospin. Derrida and Agacinski had one son.