These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics and speak of 'mark' rather than of language not as something restricted to mankind but as prelinguistic as the pure possibility of language working every where there is a relation to something else. And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan in general so badly understood of deconstruction (.

His work influenced various activists and political movements. Particularly in his later writings he frequently addressed ethical and political themes. : /ʒɑːk ˈdɛrɨdə/; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; July 15 1930 – October 9 2004) was a French philosopher born in French Algeria.