ABSTRACT
In the spirit of the author's celebrated dictum that “there is nothing outside the text,” Jacques Derrida long resisted the publication of information about his life. For seventeen years, he even refused to have a personal photograph accompany his texts. However, his fame as the founder of what came to be called “deconstruction” led him to provide biographical “scraps.” Derrida believes that Western philosophy is built upon a “Metaphysics of Presence”: upon, that is to say, the idea that there is an origin of knowledge from which “truth” can be made present. Philosophy has always seen itself as the arbiter of reason, the discipline that adjudicates what is and is not. Forms of writing other than philosophical discourse, such as poetic or literary writing, have been judged inferior, and removed from the truth.
