Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was born to a Sephardic Jewish family at El Biar in French Algeria, studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and taught there for most of his career. In 1967 — at thirty-seven, not forty-seven — he published the three books that would reshape French philosophy: La voix et le phénomène (on Husserl), L'écriture et la différence (essays), and De la grammatologie.

The technical subject of Of Grammatology is writing, but its real target is a thousand-year-old assumption of Western philosophy. From Plato to Rousseau, from Saussure to Lévi-Strauss, thinkers reproduce the same hierarchy: speech (alive, present, inward) comes first; writing (dead, absent, outward) is its derivative representation. Derrida does not reverse the hierarchy — he dismantles it from within. He shows that Saussure's own linguistics, despite the passages where it disparages writing, in fact presupposes the priority of writing through its concepts of difference and trace. Speech does not precede writing; rather an 'arche-writing' precedes both ordinary speech and writing in the classical sense. The metaphysics of presence is already absent at its own foundation.

Deconstruction, as Derrida insisted, is not a 'method of critique'; it is a reading practice that tracks the moments at which a text undoes itself. No concept holds a pure essence, because every term gains meaning only within the network of différance — difference and deferral. Through the Yale School (de Man, Hartman, Hillis Miller) in the 1970s and 1980s this approach reshaped American literary criticism, and then architecture, law, and political theory. Foucault's analyses of power, Butler's performative theory of identity, and the central frame of postcolonial criticism (Spivak, Bhabha) all pass through Derrida's 1967 turn.