Derrida Jacques (b.1930), French philosopher, author of deconstructionism, and leading figure in the postmodern movement. Postmodern thought seeks to move beyond modernism by revealing inconsistencies or aporias within the Western European tradition from Descartes to the present. These aporias are largely associated with onto-theology, a term coined by Heidegger to characterize a manner of thinking about being and truth that ultimately grounds itself in a conception of divinity. Deconstruction is the methodology of revelation: it typically involves seeking out binary oppositions defined interdependently by mutual exclusion, such as good and evil or true and false, which function as founding terms for modern thought. The ontotheological metaphysics underlying modernism is a metaphysics of presence: to be is to be present, finally to be absolutely present to the absolute, that is, to the divinity whose own being is conceived as presence to itself, as the coincidence of being and knowing in the Being that knows all things and knows itself as the reason for the being of all that is. Divinity thus functions as the measure of truth. The aporia here, revealed by deconstruction, is that this modernist measure of truth cannot meet its own measure: the coincidence of what is and what is known is an impossibility for finite intellects.
Major influences on Derrida include Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Saussure, and structuralist thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, but it was his early critique of Husserl, in Introduction à ‘L’Origine de la géometrie’ de Husserl (1962), that gained him recognition as a critic of the phenomenological tradition and set the conceptual framework for his later work. Derrida sought to demonstrate that the origin of geometry, conceived by Husserl as the guiding paradigm for Western thought, was a supratemporal ideal of perfect knowing that serves as the goal of human knowledge. Thus the origin of geometry is inseparable from its end or telos, a thought that Derrida later generalizes in his deconstruction of the notion of origin as such. He argues that this ideal cannot be realized in time, hence cannot be grounded in lived experience, hence cannot meet the ‘principle of principles’ Husserl designated as the prime criterion for phenomenology, the principle that all knowing must ground itself in consciousness of an object that is coincidentally conscious of itself. This revelation of the aporia at the core of phenomenology in particular and Western thought in general was not yet labeled as a deconstruction, but it established the formal structure that guided Derrida’s later deconstructive revelations of the metaphysics of presence underlying the modernism in which Western thought culminates. See also DECONSTRUCTION , HEIDEGGER , PHENOMENOLOGY, POSTMODER. M.C.D.