Workshop on Jacques Derrida
This workshop offers an overall account of the work of Algerian born Jacques Derrida, educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, between 1949 and 1956. His work has been read within a broad range of disciplines. Influenced by Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, primarily, Derrida’s work is situated between philosophy and literary criticism, although to suggest that his work speaks to a particular discipline is to undermine the very cornerstone of deconstruction. With the influence of his wife Marguerite, a trained psychoanalyst and translator, many of Derrida’s friends and colleagues were psychoanalysts, or analysands undergoing analysis. His approach to reading a text has often been described as undermining; this is partly due to his insistence that all texts have to be interrogated for their hidden assumptions. When asked what deconstruction is, I often refer to it as “an examination of the hidden, the forbidden and the repressed.”
Whilst providing an overview of Derrida’s work, this workshop will also examine the many definitions of deconstruction offered by Derridean scholars, as well as key concepts such as différance, hauntology, justice, justice and the law, logocentrism, metaphor, spectres of Marx, monsters, hauntology, the sign, aporias, grammatology, and textual multiplicity, the erasure of origins, Black Consciousness, decoloniality, among others.