Jacques Derrida 1930–
French critic and philosopher.
Derrida is one of France's most innovative philosophers. He is considered a revolutionary literary critic because his method involves a radical critique of Western metaphysics and a revision of the traditional concept of language.
The fact that there is distance between writer, text, and reader and that different interpretations of texts evolve over time causes metaphysicians to have less faith in writing as a reliable form of discourse. Derrida rejects the Western metaphysical insistence on the preeminence of the spoken word over the written word. Calling this "logocentrism," Derrida dismisses the belief that written language is less natural or direct than speech. He finds naive the assumption that the lack of spatial and temporal distance between speaker and listener in some way guarantees moments of perfect understanding between the two.
Derrida calls himself a "deconstructionist"; as a reader, he feels that he must reduce a text to its most self-referential point because language in itself conveys no true meaning. Derrida's famous expression "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is nothing outside the text") sums up his approach. He studies literature by concentrating solely on the language of a text, dismissing the influence of outside factors. For Derrida, words do not need to represent. This opposes the traditional critical view that the study of literature is the search for meaning, ideas, and truths in the text, based on preconceptions of authorial intention. Instead, Derrida advocates a study of the associations of words in their purely linguistic, rather than representational, function. Through this investigation Derrida reduces language by pointing out its uncertainty.