After initially training in literature in his home country of Algeria, Derrida was led by an increasing interest in philosophy to France where he took up a place at the Ecole Normale Superiere. (Now) Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Derrida is best-known for his work on the relation between thought and language with its playful interrogation of the borders between philosophical and literary writing.

Derrida's most influential books published between 1967 and 1972, reread major figures of the continental tradition of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, to expose what he calls their logocentrism. As a system of thought which continually strives to go back to origins, find centres, fix, points of reference, certify truths, verify an author's intentions, or locate a text's core of meaning, it is perhaps best encapsulated in the Biblical phrase 'in the beginning was the Word [the logos(link)]', with its its concomitant faith in God, the Self, and the Order of the Universe, and its tendency to privilege the singular and definitive over the multiple and indeterminate.

What Derrida seeks to undermine in common with other postmodernists is the metaphysical certainty not only that the unique 'I' behind any utterance guarantees a consistent, totally conscious, and rational point of view, or that a unified meaning might be traced back to an originary intention, but also that graphic modes of representation, be they in words or images, directly refer to a pre-existent reality. Precisely because concepts such as reality, consciousness, intentionality and purpose are so deeply embedded in Western thinking, as well as in language, and yet go unacknowledged, it is imperative, he contends, to question the assumption that word and world coincide, or that word and deed are one.

By paying attention to the ways in which philosophers use language, seizing for instance on their use of metaphor, Derrida illustrates that figurative devices are operative in all writing, be they literary or philosophical, and that pure thought is never independent from its mode of expression. Thus, language can give away either an underlying belief system that remains unconscious to the writer's intention (not unlike the Freudian slip), or show up a hitherto unrecognized rupture in a text's logic; which is why linguistic ambiguity, once exposed, does not merely highlight that meaning cannot be determined, but can uncover a whole nest of contradictions in the reasoning of those who profess themselves to rely on such concepts as reason and unitary demeaning for the coherency of their argument.

Derrida's close readings attend to those processes always already operative in a text, which unknit its ideal unity. The movement by which such processes are brought into play is what Derrida calls deconstruction. Working only with the resources presented to it by the text under study, a deconstructive reading displays just how much textuality is always network of unfinished meanings, with 'each' text differing from itself, for which he coins the term 'difference', and 'each' text a trace of, and endlessly refering to, other texts, which invokes Barthes' term intertextuality. While arguing that a text is 'no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content, enclosed in a book or its margins', Derrida's writing also however, performs what it states. The arguments in Of Grammatology (1967; English translation 1976), perhaps his major book to date and also one of his more 'analytic' works to generalize deconstruction's principles, are brought into a more productive frame in a later more 'synthetic' work such as Glas (1974, English translation 1986); which by knitting together commentary and citation from Hegel's and Genet's writings not only blurs the boundaries between philosophy and literature, but also creates a new kind of textuality. As if anticipating hypertext, Glas's typography undoes the linearity of writing, transgresses the borders of text and puts into question the very form of the book.