JACQUES DERRIDA, whose name became practically synonymous with the word “deconstruction”, had an enormous, though not uncontested, influence on literary study in the later half of the 20th century. While he disliked the term “philosopher”, he was nevertheless one of the most important thinkers of his era.

Like the historian Michel Foucault, he was highly revered — and reviled. To those of an empirical, commonsensical mindset, Derrida was remarkable principally for his verbose and ambiguous prose, and his willingness to ask questions while appearing reluctant to answer them. Like Foucault, Giles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, Derrida was often derided as a poseur, a “celebrity philosopher” who lacked the systematic rigour of the true philosopher, and who wrote in a deliberately obscure manner to conceal the emptiness of its content.

Certainly, much of his appeal was personal: with his shock of silver hair, solemn scowl and broad jaw, he could pass for a veteran Hollywood star. He was highly photogenic and was even the subject of a film. But to ascribe his appeal entirely to that age-old Anglo-Saxon foible of romanticising French philosophers would be flippant. Derrida revolutionised our understanding of words, texts, reading and authorship. For him, the meanings of texts were never stable. His term “ deconstruction theory” — the approach by which one unpicks a text layer-by-layer to expose its unspoken meanings — has become common parlance (even if it is not widely and properly understood). Both his acolytes and his detractors agree that Derrida made a phenomenal contribution to Western philosophy.

He expanded radically our notion of the meaning of words, and, concomitantly, reading. In an interview with the literary critic Derek Attridge, he claimed never to have “read” particular authors. This was not some coy gesture on Derrida’s part but was, rather, typical of his insistence on how one addresses and analyses any textual form. For Derrida, the notion of “reading” is one that implies a comprehensive, complete commentary on a poem or novel in its entirety, an achievement which, he said, is impossible. One can never finally read a text in its entirety, but one must always carefully read and re-read, because the act of reading is always marked by an ever-receding horizon; it is always, to use Derrida’s own words, “to come”; it is always a future which will never arrive as a present.

In this sense, for Derrida, literary language was always a figure of the impossible; it is always haunted by a radical undecidability. This is not to suggest that there is no meaning to a text, or that, by implication, Derrida’s work is nihilistic, as some overly simplistic commentaries have remarked. Instead, it is to admit that no meaning, no identity, is ever stable or fixed, but is dependent on multiple contexts, none of which is either discrete or finite.

This is perhaps no more true than of Jacques Derrida himself, whose many works attest to a myriad number of personalities and positions, none of which remains fixable by any act of analysis, but all of which bear witness to a lifetime of tireless intellectual engagement, political involvement and sustained ethical and pedagogical endeavour.

Derrida first came to the attention of the English-speaking academic world in 1966, following a paper presented at a colloquium at Johns Hopkins University. The following year he published three books in France, De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology, 1976), La Voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena, 1973), and L’Ecriture et la différence (Writing and Difference, 1978). These were followed in 1972 by three more books, translated as Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and a collection of three interviews, Positions, which secured Derrida’s provocative prominence and influence in Britain and North America.

This influence subsequently spread beyond the study of literature and literary theory, to produce effects in film and cultural studies, in legal theory, in the study and theory of architecture, and more generally throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Derrida’s writing, unsurprisingly, encountered the greatest resistance — sometimes, more simply, a lack of comprehension — in philosophy departments throughout British and North American universities, not to mention in French intellectual and political circles.

His own philosophical work began with a study in the mid-1950s of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, before he turned to detailed, painstaking close analyses of many of the canonical philosophers, from Plato to Martin Heidegger. His published works also considered a broad range of literary writers, including Shakespeare and Joyce, Célan, Genet, and Ponge. Glas, a book presented in two columns, presents discussions side-by-side of Genet and Hegel. There was also discernible in Derrida’s writing a turn, from the 1980s at least, to more overtly stated questions of ethics and politics, considerations of the identity of Europe, matters of globalisation and its implications, the meaning of democracy, and the future of the humanities and the role of the university in today’s society.

His work also engaged in a sustained fashion with the discourse of psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Freud, in numerous essays, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987) and Derrida’s short book, Archive Fever (1995). His writing was, simultaneously, rigorously informed by the great philosophical exegetical traditions and an experimental, playful exploration of tonalities and voices, an interest in what he has called the “non-verbal within the verbal”, and, broadly speaking, what he has expressed as his love of words.

In 1992 an annotated primary and secondary bibliography was published, which lists more than 40 books in French alone, between 1967 and 1991. Not counting chapters in books or interviews, there were more than 180 articles published during the same period. It is, however, impossible to offer a summary because, despite the views put forward in encyclopaedias, textbooks on literary theory, and in many classrooms, Derrida neither articulated nor proposed a single theory or philosophical position, even though he has formulated certain radical notions, such as “différance” and “iterability”. Rather, what can be said of his work is that each publication is a singular demonstration of a patient response to the contours, rhythms and turns of the subject being addressed.

This being the case, it has to be recognised that his writing necessarily transforms itself according to the given interest, whether that interest is focused on a phrase from James Joyce, the figure of writing in the history of philosophy, or the speech act theory of J. L. Austin. Because of this attentiveness on Derrida’s part it is impossible to elevate the specificity of each analysis to the level of a collection of general rules.