Deconstruction: The Hero

Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 -- October 9, 2004)

He was 36 years old in 1966. The photo here is obviously well after the time of the story.

Derrida was born in El Biar, French Algeria,  into a Sephardic Jewish family (originally from Toledo) that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of Algeria. 

Following the (Algerian) war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term school of suspicion) and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984.

We would see Derrida not only younger than the photo above, but also in the fashions of the time, when men's suits were tightly tailored and the neckties were thin. For those of us who remember that era, it's easy to see how much fashions changed very radically right after the time of the story.

Here's Jack Palance with Brigitte Bardot in Contempt in 1963: