Peter Salmon on Derrida on Deconstruction

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Jacques Derrida was a controversial philosopher whose writing could be fiendishly difficult to read. Nevertheless he had many followers. Here Pete Salmon, author of a recent biography of Derrida, manages to give a clear account of what Derrida meant by deconstruction.

This episode was sponsored by St John's College. For more information about the college go to www.sjc.edu/podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.
0:07.8	This edition of Philosophy Bites is supported by St John's College. With campuses in Santa
0:12.5	Fae in New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland, the Graduate Institute at St John's College
0:18.0	is a home for students seeking a lifelong commitment to thoughtful, collaborative
0:22.2	inquiry into fundamental human questions. Encounter the most influential writers and
0:28.2	thinkers from the West or the East in this vibrant community of learning.
0:33.2	More at SJC.edu-podcast. That's SJC.edu-podcast.
0:45.2	In the Anglo-American world, the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida is probably
0:51.2	studied more in literary theory than in philosophy departments. Indeed, many British and American
0:57.4	analytic philosophers are sneerier about his books, which are notoriously difficult.
1:02.7	When he received an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992, several leading philosophers objected.
1:09.4	As his biographer Peter Salmon explains, Derrida's best known for his theory of deconstruction.
1:15.3	Peter Salmon, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thanks very much, lovely to be here.
1:19.5	The topic we're going to focus on today is Derrida and deconstruction. So who was Jacques Derrida?
1:26.4	Well, there's a lot of different versions of who Jacques Derrida was, depending if you're
1:30.4	one of his acolytes or his defenders or one of your enemies. I just did the quotation marks
1:35.4	in the air when I said that, which is very deridian. But the basic facts are, he's a French
1:38.8	philosopher who was born in Algeria. He shot to fame in 1967 with three incredible books
1:45.2	of gramatology, writing and difference in speech and phenomena, which sort of all came out
1:49.6	simultaneously virtually and gave birth to deconstruction, a method of philosophy, which
1:55.4	ever since then has warmed its way into many, many discourses, including philosophy, literary
2:00.4	theory, cinema studies, gender studies and so forth, which looked at truth and what truth
	...

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