The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (dayr-ee-dah) is the founder of the theory of deconstruction, the main philosophical tenet of poststructuralism, an intellectual movement that from the late 1960’s through the 1990’s had a tremendous influence on the development of literary studies. Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, Algeria, of assimilated Sephardic-Jewish parents. He received his baccalaureate in 1948 in Algeria and in 1950 began studies in France, working at the École Normale Supérieure with the Hegel scholar Jean Hyppolite. In 1957 he temporarily abandoned his doctoral thesis, “The Ideality of the Literary Object,” and moved toward the deconstructive questioning presented in his “Speech and Phenomena.” Derrida’s reservations about the very idea of thesis presentation and the tradition of positional/oppositional logic indefinitely impeded his dissertation. Beginning in 1960 he taught at the Sorbonne in Paris for four years, continuing his work on the interface of literary theory and philosophy, particularly the phenomenology of G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. In 1966 Derrida presented his paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the now-famous structuralism conference at The Johns Hopkins University, and in 1967, the single most significant year in his publishing history, he published three major works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and “Speech and Phenomena,” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.

After 1972 Derrida divided his time between teaching in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure and in the United States at universities such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, and the University of California, Irvine. Also in 1972 Derrida published his second set of major publications (Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and Positions), in which he further develops his theory of deconstruction, always within the context of sociohistorical issues. The term “deconstruction” cannot be unequivocally defined; it is not a method nor merely a theory, but it is most appropriately understood as a strategy of reading that is acutely responsive to the conditions of a text’s production. Through deconstructive readings Derrida calls into question what he designates as the “logocentric” tradition of Western metaphysics. In Of Grammatology, Derrida neologistically creates the term “logocentrism” to characterize the Western metaphysical view that essences are sustained by transcendental signifieds, or some assumed “center” external to signifiers whose meaning, truth, and validation they convey. Derrida argues that logocentric thinking, which is phonocentric and ethnocentric as well, presupposes universal truths that may be critiqued as cultural constructs or comforting linguistic fictions.

For Derrida the rigidity and conservatism of the French Academy and intellectual life in the 1950’s and 1960’s represented the embodiment of logocentrism, particularly evident in the notion of a single, authoritative, traditional interpretation of a literary text. Although a central purpose of deconstruction is to examine, destabilize, and reinscribe received opinions, Derrida has been criticized for undermining or exposing so-called traditional ideas without providing any real alternative. In opposition to logocentrism, however, Derrida’s theory of deconstruction constitutes what he calls a “grammatology,” a theory of writing that proposes that the graphic distribution of signs has the effect of infinitely postponing meaning, or the transcendental signified. Meaning is never completely present to itself or a matter of intuitive evidence; it is divided from itself through the “play” of difference.

To explain the theory of writing as “dissemination,” or “play,” Derrida invented the term différance, derived from the French verb différer , which combines the verb “to differ” and the verb “to defer.” Derrida expands upon the semiology (study of sign systems) of Ferdinand de Saussure, who held that the sign...