Jacques Derrida: A Short Biography
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction are what Jacques Derrida is known for best but who was the man behind these pivotal ideas? The philosopher who is most familiar to scholars in the area of Literary Criticism and who, together with Baudrillard and Foucault, has had a significant effect on recent thinking was adept at failing examinations as a young man. This is nothing new in the arena of budding geniuses.
He is in good company with other such original thinkers as Albert Einstein, C. G. Jung, and Foucault. The creative seed must be so busy flourishing that regular school work and entrance exams appear more as painful necessities than academic enrichment. He also suffered from anti-semitic laws coming from the French Vichy government in 1942. Nevertheless, even the greatest of minds need fellow scholars to bounce their ideas against in an intellectual exchange and after failing his baccalaureat in June 1947 he spent a year reading the philosophers, Henri Bergson and Jean-Paul Sartre, and passed the exam in 1948. He failed and passed several exams while developing his theories on language and writing.
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