At the age of 12, Jacques Derrida had a brutal introduction to the adult world. He had been born into a prosperous Jewish family in a village near Algiers in 1930, and enjoyed a sunny childhood. But then the war came, and Pétainism gripped Algeria. Derrida was thrown out of his lycée and told: "French culture was not made for little Jew-boys." After a year he got back on to the educational ladder, but by now he was surly and disaffected. He spent his time playing football, and failed his baccalauréat in 1947. After that, however, he realised that he loved literature. He set his heart on becoming a teacher and a writer, and at the age of 19 he made the frightening journey to Paris. He became a residential student at the fiercely competitive Lycée Louis le Grand, and began his lifelong struggle with "nostalgeria."
In Paris, it was the age of existentialism. Derrida made friends with fellow students like Pierre Bourdieu and young teachers like Michel Foucault, and they egged each other on in their exuberant ambition to become bohemian celebrities and Left-Bank political radicals. They promised themselves they would take over the role created by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre had invented a form of philosophy that dealt directly with the world he lived in - with war and revolution, with racism, with jazz and film, with sexuality, love and psychoanalysis, and he was the man they needed to beat. As Bourdieu recalled it, they spotted a chink in the old man's armour. His great masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, was explicitly indebted to the German thinker Martin Heidegger, but Sartre was a careless reader, his German was weak, and Heidegger himself had published a mocking essay about him. Clearly the future lay with those who could show that Sartre got Heidegger wrong. The only trouble, according to Bourdieu, was that these philosophical Oedipuses knew even less about Heidegger than Sartre did.
In due course Derrida would make up the deficiency, becoming perhaps the world's most formidable Heideggerian. He spent the best part of 15 years reading his way into the texts, and laying the foundations of a university career in Paris, before exploding into fame or notoriety in the late 1960s. He gave some spectacular lectures in both France and America and in 1967 published three substantial books: Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference. For those who cared to notice, all of them contained in their notes elaborate engagements with the works of Heidegger, and skirmishes with the French existentialists.
Derrida enjoyed his fame, but he was bewildered by it too. After his slow start, he was turning out to be prodigiously prolific. He became a literary equivalent of Picasso, capable of turning anything he came across - Shakespeare or Joyce, a train journey, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela, a dream or a new computer programme - into a striking work of philosophical art. But he was also devoted to his vocation as a teacher: perhaps he was not always very good at it, but he took great pains to guide his students, to help, to explain, and even on occasion to simplify. That is how he came up with the fateful word "deconstruction." It was, he admitted, an "ugly and difficult word" and he was appalled by its sudden mediatic success.
He should not really have been surprised. The word "deconstruction" enabled his vision of philosophy to be reduced to a childishly simple three-stage recipe. First, choose your text: anything will do - a speech, an article, a book or a play. Second, spot the dichotomies on which it depends: science vs common sense, masculine vs feminine, insider vs outsider and so on. Third, note that these dichotomies cannot be justified in terms of the arguments that make use of them. Serve immediately, while observing sagaciously that every argument presupposes more than it can prove, and watch everyone's dreams of absolute certainty go up in puffs of smoke.
Anyone can try it, and up to a point it works. But if it was a boon to Derrida's more slow-witted followers, deconstruction was also a godsend to his bone-headed critics. It was as if this preternaturally gifted writer - who was also, by the way, unforgivably handsome and charming - had admitted that his ideas could be reduced to a cheap piece of gimmickry. He seemed to have done a Gerald Ratner. His quiet commendations of quizzical caution could now be packaged as incendiary acts of anarchic nihilism, or assaults on the entire western tradition. Derrida became a "relativist" and public enemy number one in the war on error.
The runaway success of deconstruction divided Derrida's audience into two groups: an ignorant public that either loved him or hated him, and a band of esoteric insiders, who knew that Derrida would always be a mystery to those who had not mastered their Heidegger. The insiders realised that it was precisely because he prized the truth that Derrida hated the zealous apostles of certainty. They could see that when he challenged great philosophical classics - the works of the pre-Socratics, of Plato and Aristotle, of Descartes, of the French Enlightenment, and of Kant, Hegel and Husserl - he was also defending them. They knew that for Derrida, as for Heidegger, there was no point in imagining that you can transcend the historical situation in which you happen to find yourself: we are our pasts, and all we can do is try to understand them a little better. And they understood that "deconstruction" was not some Disneyfied invention of the Derrida industry, but a learned adaptation of one of the central concepts of Heidegger's 1927 masterpiece Being and Time: the idea of the "destruction" of the history of philosophy.
Derrida divided his public, and increasingly he divided his output as well. The works of the 1960s and 1970s were relatively concise and accessible, and he maintained a frank public face in interviews and talks to the end of his life. But many of his later writings were astonishingly wayward, and even his greatest admirers sometimes found him a little garrulous.
In his later years, Derrida noted ruefully that his life was the opposite of Heidegger's. Heidegger was a thinker of roots, who strayed as little as possible from the rural soil of southern Germany, whereas Derrida was the very model of a restless turbo-prof, constantly running between airports, amphitheatres and hotels, bags and scarves streaming behind him. And he never let up, even in recent times when cancer was visibly sapping his vitality. Let us hope that when the dust has settled and envious hostility has ebbed away, he will be recognised for what he achieved. In a period when the philosophical world was becoming more and more prosaic and bureaucratic, he demonstrated that philosophy is more than a form of knowledge: that it is a branch of literature too. And he produced dozens of philosophical works of art, marvellous in their elaboration, their craftsmanship and their beauty.
