Analysis #5 - Poststructuralism and Derrida

Born in El-Biar, Algeria, to a Jewish Algerian family, Derrida moved to France at the age of 22 to begin his studies at the École Normale Supérieur, university for Higher education in Paris, focusing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. His particular interest was in the analysis of écriture, the writing of philosophy itself.What is not commonly known about Derrida is the fact that though he is thought to be French, he is Algerian, since at the time of his birth, Algeria was a French colony.
From 1965 to 1984, Derrida taught at his alma mater, dividing his time between universities in Paris and America, at schools such as Yale and Johns Hopkins. Over the years he wrote several books from Speech and Phenomena , Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, all in 1967, to The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), all of which spoke of his “post-structural” ideas as he and other French theorists had their ideas called by the Americans. He was not alone in his theories, one example being Michel Foucault himself.
After his death of pancreatic cancer in 2004, he has without question been labeled one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

Post-structuralism is one of the more difficult theories to translate. In short, though, it can be said that is shows human culture to be molded from language itself.
The title itself was created by American scholars to place a name to the series of works done by French academics. The distinction between the two, post-structuralism and structuralism itself forms a distinction between organization of reality with that of imagination and ideas, a sort of ‘third order”. The precise idea of the differences structuralism differ from author to author, with common themes of rejection and self-sufficiency, as well as a series of binary oppositions throughout.
Structuralism itself was a movement during the 1950s and 60s that used analytical concepts of linguistics, psychology, anthropology and other fields to understand the construct of culture itself.
Like any theory, both structuralism and post-structuralism had their faults. Structuralism felt that systems of meaning were arbitrary and unnecessary, though critics would say that this wasn’t completely true since structuralists still found reason to find a fixed point in meaning to be studied.
Like many theorists, Derrida knew that both poststructuralism and structuralism were faulty, which kept him writing like many others in both areas, attempting to find a point that there were no faults, if that is ever possible:
"The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue" (p.1691, Derrida).
Here Derrida gets across that so far, there is no idea where language will lead the world in its ever changing ways. We will just have to stand aside and watch.

Works Cited
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.