Jacques Derrida was one of the most famous, controversial, but also wise figures in recent French intellectual life. He invented a way of doing philosophy that he called Deconstruction,
which fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields, especially literary studies. Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers, in what was then French colonial Algeria.
His family were jews, his father a salesman for a local wine firm. He was initially slow at school and harbored dreams of becoming a professional soccer player.
In 1942, under new laws enacted by the collaborationist French Vichy regime, Derrida, like all other Jewish children, was forcibly excluded from his Lycee and spent a lot of his time at home with his mother.
He suffered greatly from the anti-semitism of Algeria's majority Muslim population and was deeply marked by the experience of having been in an inferior position
at the nexus of three different religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which claimed to speak the truth none of which knew how to treat the others with particular respect.
In 1949, just turned 19, Derrida traveled to Paris to take up a place at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. He was a Brilliant student, but in an odd position.
Highly privileged in terms of education, but utterly at the margins in Metropolitan France in his status as an Algerian Jew. Though Derrida was not an autobiographical writer, it's hard not to read his work as a highly abstract response to his first-hand knowledge of bigotry and exclusion.
It was from the late 1960s onwards the Derrida began to develop the ideas that made his name. In time he became a celebrity intellectual around Europe and America.
He was hugely glamorous. A good-looking man with great taste in raincoats and haircuts. He had a rich, diverse and complex love life.
