Philosopher, film star, father of \u201cpost truth\u201d\u2014the real story of Jacques Derrida<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to \u201clittle more than an object of ridicule.\u201d For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps<\/em>, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times. Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is a compulsively readable intellectual biography of Derrida that teases out his endlessly fascinating thought, even when it is at its knottiest, with admirable patience and lucidity. Salmon\u2019s book, in vividly transmitting the intellectual excitement of Derrida\u2019s times, reminds the reader that, especially in his thinking about ethics, he remains a philosopher who is urgently, politically relevant to our times too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Matthew Beaumont, Professor at English at University College, London<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe life of Jacques Derrida has never been told as elegantly or engagingly as it is in Peter Salmon\u2019s new book. Salmon realises, as nobody else has until now, how the life and the philosophy are dialectically braided but never makes the rookie mistake of letting the former entirely account for the latter. He relates rivetingly how an Arab Jewish philosopher from the colonised margins of imperial Europe, who had been thrown out of his Algierian lyc\u00e9e for being a Jew thanks to Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime laws, came to perform one of the most impressive takedowns in intellectual history, namely the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence underpinning western thought. In delightfully readable, often laconic prose, Salmon helped me to understand Derrida as never before and demonstrated why he is not, as some detractors called him, the Devil but much more cherishable. A wonderful book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 Stuart Jeffries, author of Grand Hotel Abyss<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA precise intellectual biography … Salmon\u2019s ability to render the man and the mind behind Derrida\u2019s \u201cnotoriously difficult\u201d style accessible make this volume a rich resource for both newcomers to, and fans of, \u201cone of the great philosophers of this or any age.”\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida\u2019s intimate relationships with writers sucheven as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva.
Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps<\/em> will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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