- Lived:
- 1930–2004 · El Biar (Algiers), then Paris — with a second life in American universities
- Tradition:
- French philosophy after structuralism; phenomenology's most patient heir and most unsettling auditor; inventor of deconstruction
- The Big Idea:
- Meaning is never simply present — every word carries traces of the words it isn't — and the great texts of the West can be read so closely that their own suppressed tensions come to light.
- In their words:
- "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" — "there is no outside-text" (the most misquoted sentence of the century; this chapter fixes it).
- If you remember one thing:
- Deconstruction is not destruction. It is reading a text carefully enough to show that the margins hold up the center — a lesson its inventor learned at twelve, when his own country pushed him out at the school gate.