Although he was not altogether happy with the fact, Jacques Derrida's name has become synonymous with deconstruction. Derrida was born in El-Biar, near Algiers, in 1930. In 1949 he left for Paris and in 1952 began to study at the École Normale Supérieure, where he taught from 1964 to 1984. Beginning in 1975, Derrida spent a few weeks each year teaching in the United States. While at Yale University Derrida collaborated with Paul de Man (1919–1983), leading to the extraordinary impact that deconstruction has had on the study of literature in the United States, an impact that quickly spread to other disciplines and countries.

Derrida's record of publications is remarkable. In 1962 he wrote an introduction to a translation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry that in many respects anticipates the later works. In 1967 he published a further study of Edmund Husserl, Speech and Phenomena; a collection of essays, Writing and Difference...