WDeconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who defined the term variously throughout his career. In its simplest form it can be regarded as a criticism of Platonism and the idea of true forms, or essences, which take precedence over appearances. Deconstruction instead places the emphasis on appearance, or suggests, at least, that essence is to be found in appearance. Derrida would say that the difference is "undecidable", in that it cannot be discerned in everyday experiences.
WBehind the Looking Glass (ISBN 978-1847184863), by Sherry L. Ackerman, addresses the contemporary deconstruction of the Carroll Myth. The book offers an examination of the nineteenth century Neoplatonic Revival in Great Britain., with special emphasis upon its influence on the writings of Lewis Carroll. Conciliatory points between revived Neoplatonism, theosophy and spiritualism are identified.
WBeing and Time is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been favorably compared with several works by Kant and Hegel. Heidegger maintains that philosophers have misunderstood the concept of Being since Plato, misapplying it solely in the analysis of particular beings. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis of Dasein, or "being-in-the-world." It's also noted for an array of neologisms and complex language, as well as an extended treatment of "authenticity" as a means to grasp and confront the unique and finite possibilities of the individual.
WHélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. Cixous is best known for her article "The Laugh of the Medusa", which established her as one of the early thinkers in post-structural feminism. She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris.
WJacques Derrida, born in Algeria, was a French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he analyzed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.
WAlexander García Düttmann studied Philosophy in Frankfurt as a student of Alfred Schmidt and in Paris as a student of Jacques Derrida.
WDivya Dwivedi is a philosopher and author based in India. She is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her work focuses on ontology, metaphysics, literature, and philosophy of politics.
WTerence Francis Eagleton is a British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
WJacques Ehrmann was a French literary theorist and a faculty member of the Yale University French Department from 1961 until his death in 1972.
WSimon Glendinning is an English philosopher. Glendinning is currently Professor of European Philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics. He is Director of the Forum for European Philosophy.
WMartin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019), Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and won the René Wellek Prize in 2020.
WMartin Andreas Hainz is an Austrian philologist, theorist and philosopher. He has taught at several universities in Europe and the United States, among them the universities of Vienna, Timișoara and Iaşi. He is a member of the Northeastern Language Association (NEMLA). His main interests are contemporary Austrian philosophy and literature.
WHauntology is a concept referring to the return or persistence of elements from the past, as in the manner of a ghost. It is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism.
WKōjin Karatani is a Japanese philosopher and literary critic.
WLeonard "Len" Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy.
WLukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy is a book by Lucien Goldmann published after his death in 1973.
WJean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary Continental philosophy and author of 26 books and many articles. He was a director of the International College of Philosophy which was founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt.
WMichael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He works in the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy, environmental thought, and political philosophy.
WJoseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, he was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
WShaj Mohan is a philosopher based in India. His philosophical works are in the areas of metaphysics, reason, philosophy of technology, philosophy of politics, and secrecy. Mohan's works are based on the principle of anastasis which holds that philosophy is an ever-present possibility.
WJean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher. Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre, a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nancy is the author of works on many thinkers, including La remarque spéculative in 1973 on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Le Discours de la syncope (1976) and L'Impératif catégorique (1983) on Immanuel Kant, Ego sum (1979) on René Descartes, and Le Partage des voix (1982) on Martin Heidegger. In addition to Le titre de la lettre, Nancy collaborated with Lacoue-Labarthe on several other books and articles. Nancy is credited with reopening the question of the ground of community and politics with his work La communauté désoeuvrée. Blanchot and Agamben responded to this work with The Unavowable Community (1983) and The Coming Community (1983) respectively. One of the very few monographs that Jacques Derrida ever wrote on a contemporary philosopher is On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy.
WRein Raud is an Estonian scholar and author.
WAvital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program.
WGayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
WBernard Stiegler was a French philosopher. He was head of the Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), which he founded in 2006 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou. He was also the founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, Ars Industrialis; the founder in 2010 of the philosophy school, pharmakon.fr, held at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel; and a co-founder in 2018 of Collectif Internation, a group of "politicised researchers" across multiple disciplines. His best known work is Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
WIn postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.