Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria on July 15, 1930. He graduated from the �cole Normal Sup�rieure in 1956. He taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the �cole Normal Sup�rieure for around 30 years. His works of philosophy and linguistics form the basis of the school of criticism known as deconstruction. This theory states that language is an inadequate method to give an unambiguous definition of a work, as the meaning of text can differ depending on reader, time, and context. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 40 books on various aspects of deconstruction including Of Grammatology, Glas, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and… Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 9, 2004 at the age of 74.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakis university professor in the humanities at Columbia University and the author of many books, including The Post-Colonial Critic, Nationalism and the Imagination and, with Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State?, the last two also published by Seagull Books.