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Derrida: A Biography

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This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world - a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the differen...more

Hardcover, 629 pages

Published November 9th 2012 by Polity

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Jan 26, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis marked it as the-value-of-a-dollar

Reviewed by Marc Farrant in review31, "'Someone like me - an old prof.'":
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/10...

An excerpt:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

btw, the Derrida film is of rather questionable value. But since it's a film, it goes down easy.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303326/?...

___________
The Eagleton review:
"Even so, the Cambridge backwoodsmen were wrong. Derrida, who died of cancer in 2004 urging his friends to affirm life, was no nihilist. Nor did he want to blow up weste...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Steven Peterson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Born Jackie Derrida in Algeria, he changed his name to Jacques after beginning his academic career. The book traces his early years, including facing challenges as a Jew in French Algeria during World War II. The challenge of any book on Derrida is to provide a sense of both the person and his ideas. And Derrida's ideas are not always easy to grasp. Indeed, Michel Foucault once referred to Derrida as "obscurante terroriste." That is, Derrida's work was obscurely written--and when one missed what...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Grady rated it 5 of 5 stars

Blending Biography with Philosophy: A Daunting Task

Benoît Peeters has taken on a challenge in deciding to write a biography of Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004), a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. His work was labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy.

As writer/critic Andy Martin as said, `Benoît Peeters has cut through a lot of the myth and mystique surrounding Derrida. There is probably more...more Blending Biography with Philosophy: A Daunting Task

Benoît Peeters has taken on a challenge in deciding to write a biography of Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004), a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. His work was labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy.

As writer/critic Andy Martin as said, `Benoît Peeters has cut through a lot of the myth and mystique surrounding Derrida. There is probably more illuminating information here - and correspondence - than has ever been made public before. That in itself is a major achievement. But sometimes Peeters reminds you a little too much of one of the master's seminars. You want to shout out: 'Yes, but can you now say what you actually think about all this?!' (and 'Do you think you could keep it brief this time?'). In another way this book is about as un-Derridean as it is possible to be. It begins with his birth (to French-Algerian, Jewish parents) and childhood (he was a would-be footballer, like Camus, and a boy racer who lost his driving license), and it ends with his death in Paris (in 2004). At school Jackie is already being advised to abstain from a 'tendency to complication' and 'superior verbalism'. It's all very linear and teleological - in other words, the kind of text that Derrida himself would probably have scorned. But it's none the worse for that. In form, Peeters is refreshingly anti-Derridean; at the level of discourse, he remains enormously sympathetic - sometimes with too much emphasis on the pathetic. Peeters's Derrida is vulnerable, sensitive, prone to bouts of melancholia, neurotic, hypochondriac, and verging on suicidal. During one period of his life he develops a phobia of flying. He is as tormented and torn as his prose. This is Derrida the poetic soul.'

At 630 pages taking on the experience of diving in to Peeter's DERRIDA is a pledge of time. So much of the philosophy and writings of Derrida are complex in and of themselves and reading another's interpretation seems at times to add to the verbosity without enhancing the understanding. But as Peeters so well states in his Introduction, `So this biography has refused to exclude anything. Writing the life of Jacques Derrida means writing the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who became the French philosopher whose works have been the most widely translated throughout the world; the story of a fragile and tormented man who, to the end of his life, continued to see himself as `rejected' by the French university system. It means bringing back to life such different worlds as pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École normale supérieure, the structuralist period, and the turbulent events of 1968 and afterwards.'

The book is as complete as one would wish and it adds pages of photographs of Derrida and the people who influenced his thinking and his life. Peeters does not avoid the controversial issues such as the phallogocentric argument: Logocentrism is the term Derrida uses to refer to the philosophy of determinateness, while phallocentrism is the term he uses to describe the way logocentrism itself has been genderized by a "masculinist (phallic)" and "patriarchal" agenda. Hence, Derrida intentionally merges the two terms phallocentrism and logocentrism as "phallogocentrism". There are no stones unturned, if only at times for a peak; there is simply so much material to cover and Peters does it well.

Grady Harp
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