Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was born in Algeria, and held positions at the École Normale Supériere (1964-1983) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1983-2004) in France, and, among other visiting appointments, at Yale University (1975-1986) and the University of California at Irvine (1986-2004) in the United States. Derrida published on an enormous range of thinkers and topics across his career. After an initial focus on Husserl's phenomenology, in the 1960s he engaged work in the human sciences, avant-garde literature, and the history of philosophy to challenge fundamental philosophical conceptions of time, presence, language, identity, and difference. In the 1970s he deepened his engagement with psychoanalysis, literature, and aesthetics, and from the mid-1980s on focused more explicitly on ethical, political, and religious issues. There is an large quantity of Anglophone scholarship on Derrida's work, covering almost all aspects of his work, and from disciplinary perspectives that include but extend far beyond philosophy as it is institutionally defined.

Derrida's most influential work was published early in his career: Of Grammatology, Voice and Phenomenon, and Writing and Difference, all appearing in 1967, and 1972's Margins of Philosophy  and Dissemination. After this time Derrida continued to publish at a steady rate on an ever-expanding number of thinkers and themes, making it hard to single out texts as particularly prominent. But the most widely read of his later works include "Force of Law", The Gift of Death, and Specters of Marx.