THE French philosopher Jacques Derrida, revered as the founder of the deconstructionist school of thought, has died at the age of 74. He had been diagnosed last year with pancreatic cancer.

Derrida, who taught at Harvard and the Sorbonne, became the epitome of radical chic in the intellectual world of the 1970s and 1980s with his controversial theories that challenged the basis of traditional thought.

At their simplest, Derrida’s writings claimed the existence of multiple meanings in literature — and in fields such as art, music and architecture — that were not necessarily intended or even understood by the work’s own creator.

Notoriously reluctant to provide a concise definition of his own philosophy, he once cryptically declared the “least bad definition” of deconstruction to be “a certain experience of the impossible”.

Derrida’s theories were the subject of more than 400 books, but some critics dismissed his work as impenetrable nonsense. When Cambridge University announced in 1992 that it was planning to award him an honorary degree, many staff protested, denouncing his writings as “absurd doctrines that deny the distinction between reality and fiction”. The degree was finally approved by 336 votes to 204.

Born in Algeria in 1930 to Jewish parents, Derrida studied at France’s celebrated Ecole Normale Supérieure before pursuing an academic career, dividing his time between France and America. Among the main influences on his thought were Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, and Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst.

Derrida set out his “deconstructive approach” to reading texts in three books written in 1967, the most prominent of which, Speech and Phenomena, was translated into English six years later. In it he challenged traditional thinking that language can express ideas without changing them and questioned the “ruling illusion of western metaphysics” that underpinning everything is pure truth.

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