Derrida may have been named Jackie after a Charlie Chaplin child star
The philosopher behind deconstruction began life as Jackie Derrida in French Algeria, possibly named after Jackie Coogan of Chaplin's The Kid. He was thrown out of school at twelve by Vichy antisemitic quotas, dreamed of playing professional football, and went on to publish more than 40 books that unsettled fields from law to architecture.
He was born in 1930 in El Biar, near Algiers, into a Sephardic Jewish family whose ancestors came from Toledo and who had become French citizens under the Crémieux Decree of 1870. His father spent his working life at a wine and spirits firm, a job the son later called exhausting and humiliating. An elder brother had died in infancy the year before Jackie's birth, and Derrida suspected all his life that he was a replacement. A middle name, Élie, given at his circumcision but left off his birth certificate, became what he called his hidden name.
In 1942 colonial officials enforcing Vichy quotas expelled him from his lycée. Rather than attend a Jewish school set up by displaced teachers, he skipped classes for a year and played football. As a teenager he read Rousseau, Nietzsche, Gide, Camus and Sartre as weapons against family and society.
He moved to Paris in 1949, failed the École Normale Supérieure entrance exam once, and got in on his second attempt in 1952, befriending Louis Althusser on day one. Research at the Husserl Archive in Leuven led to a master's thesis on Husserl, and after passing the agrégation in 1956 he spent a year at Harvard reading Joyce's Ulysses.
Deconstruction grew out of close readings of Saussure's linguistics and of the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. Critics differ over whether Speech and Phenomena or Of Grammatology, both from 1967, matters most. Though tied to post-structuralism, he kept his distance from that label and rejected postmodernity. His notoriously difficult prose made him controversial, yet his influence reached architecture through deconstructivism and music through hauntology. He taught at the University of California, Irvine, for two decades and died in 2004.
Source: Jacques Derrida
