A Report on Jacques Derrida and His Philosophy

What if everything around you had no essential meaning or root cause? What if every piece of text you have ever read had no structure at all? Well Jacques Derrida invented a theory that proves that our way of thinking is completely wrong. Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El-Biar, Algeria, he was born into a Sephardic Jewish family. Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher who is really known for developing deconstruction which is a form of semiotic analysis. He talked about deconstruction a lot and shared his discovery in many ways. Also, he is one of the major figures that work with post structuralism and postmodern philosophy and is surely one of the most influential and complex thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. Although Derrida published his first book in the late 1960s, he is still considered as a difficult philosopher and known as the inventor of post structuralism and deconstruction, which is his most famous accomplishment and is what’s going to prove to you that you have a total different mindset in texts and literary. But to understand the theory and know how he invented them you first have to know some additional things.

Postmodernity embraces destruction, conflict and discontinuity in matters of history, identity and culture. It denies the thought that any cultural phenomenon can be explained of one existing cause. It also is suspicious of any attempt to provide all-embracing total theories.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a method invented by Jacques Derrida in (1930-2004) to help us understand the relationship between text and meaning. His method was to organize reading of texts to look for things that run counter to its intended meaning or structural agreement. The purpose of deconstruction is to show how complex, changeable, unstable, or impossible is the usage of language in a given text, and language as a whole. Throughout his readings, Derrida hoped to show deconstruction at work.

Many arguments in continental philosophy bordering ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida's observations. Ever since the 1980s, these observations inspired a range of theoretical organizations in civilizations, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and the feminist school of thought. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism.

Derrida invented deconstruction when he created post structuralism by turning post modernity into something new but wanted to develop his own particular post structuralist blend of philosophy, dialectology and literary analysis. However what Derrida focuses on is digging out the meaning of meaning, which is also connected to deconstruction. Structuralism is a belief that reflect events which are explainable by structures, data, and other phenomena below the surface. Therefore, it is obvious that structuralists search objective knowledge of their world and sought for the structure of text. On the other hand, The Post-structuralist Derrida for example denies the possibility of such a structure. That is to say, Derrida’s deconstruction, which is always called together with Poststructuralism, gives us new ways of thinking. Derrida has made great efforts in declining the traditional understanding of truth. The Post-structuralists are claiming that the real truth is impossible to know. Ironically, the Post-Structuralists including Derrida are doubtful concerning the reader’s ability to confirm belief and thus say that he knows something. Jacques Derrida has been working for years creating theories and new ways of thinking which most of them are related to deconstruction and post structuralism such as the literary theory and the criticism theory and so on.

Derrida’s theory

Jacques Derrida denies the idea that things have an essential meaning or root cause. He follows the postmodern thought that rejects the idea of having a single, basic reason but they actually have more than one reason. In the End, Derrida’s objective is to weaken an independent thinking of the reader. By doing this, the reader can observe the text how he wishes, putting in it his own experiences and adjusting his understanding. Derrida also had his own set of rules, the basic ones were

1. We use language to organize – and even construct reality. Language enables us to give meaning to the world.
2. No single thing gives off a meaning of its own accord. Meaning is through its relationship to other things.
3. Verbal and written language provides the clearest demonstration of these structural or relational properties of meaning.

Derrida’s Inspiration

Jacques Derrida was heavily inspired by Ferdinand Saussure, who is the founder of both modern linguistics and structuralism. In fact, Saussure’s structuralism was enhanced upon and developed into post-structuralism by Derrida. To understand Derrida’s post-structuralism, we need to know a little about structuralism first. Ferdinand Saussure is said to be the creator of both modern linguistics and structuralism. He said that instead of trying to seek the root or history of words, we should look at the interrelationships of words within language as a whole since its useless to find the origin or record of the words.