1967 -- Derrida Emerges

1870 -- The Crémieux Decree. Jews in French Algeria given French citizenship under the new Third Republic.

1901 -- Logical Investigations, Husserl

On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.

1919 -- "The Anecdote of a Jar", Wallace Stevens

1921 -- The Kid, produced by Charlie Chaplin, featuring Jackie Coogan.
1922 -- Ulysses, James Joyce (Paris)

1927 -- Sein und Zeit, (Being and Time) Heidegger. 

Heidegger maintains that the concept of Being has fundamental importance for philosophy and that philosophy has avoided the question since the time of the Ancient Greeks, turning instead to the analysis of particular beings.  

1930 Jul 15 -- Birth of Jackie Élie Derrida (Jaques Derrida)

Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), 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.

 His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970) and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991), named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; 

some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid. (WP)

Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother. Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar. 

1940 Jul -- Vichy Regime takes control of France

1942 autumn -- Derrida removed from school and placed in a special Jewish school in Algiers. He skips school rather than attempt

On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. 

He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player).

1942 Nov -- Operation Torch. Liberation of Algiers.
1945 after -- Derrida reads the classics

In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Camus and Sartre.

1949 -- Derrida moves to Paris to obtain a proper education

In Paris he gegan attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne. At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS)

1952 -- Derrida is admitted to the École Normale Supérieure on his second try. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends.

1953–1954 -- Derrida visits the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, completing his master's degree in philosophy (diplôme d'études supérieures ) on Edmund Husserl.

Gary Banham has said that Derrida's dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation."

1956 -- Derrida passes the highly competitive agrégation exam. He receives a grant to study at Harvard.

1956-1957 -- Derrida spends the academic year reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.

1957 Jun -- Derrida marries Marguerite Aucouturier (born 1932) in Boston

1957-1959 -- 27 y.o. Derrida avoids military service in Algeria by asking to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English.

1959 -- Derrida poses question of structuralism: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This original complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction"

1960-1964 -- Derrida teaches 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.

1960s early -- Derrida begins speaking and writing publicly, addressing the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. 

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.   

For the later structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.

1962 -- Derrida publishes Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. 

1963 -- Derrida's wife Marguerite gives birth to their first child, Pierre.

1963 Mar 3 -- Cogito and the History of Madness. lecture by Derrida at the Collège philosophique . It is a a critique of Michel Foucault, given at a conference which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two.

1964 -- Derrida obtains a permanent position at the École Normale Supérieure on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite.

1964 -- Structuralist wave hits the United States (Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other places).

1966 Aug 31 -- La battaglia di Algeri, debut at Venice Film Festival

1966 Oct 21 -- Derrida dethrones Structuralism. La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines (Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences), lecture at Johns Hopkins University 

Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). 

The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.

Derrida's countercurrent take on structuralism, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a "phenomenology vs structuralism debate." 

1967 -- Publication of the three books which establish Derrida's reputation:

This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". 

The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, 

and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. 

He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.

L'écriture et la différence  (Writing and Difference) Éditions du Seuil

Included in the collection is his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, which changed the course of the conference leading it to be renamed The Structuralist Controversy, and caused Derrida to receive his first major attention outside France. The lecture is titled Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.

De la grammatologie  (Of Grammatology) Les Éditions de Minuit

The author discusses writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne Condillac, Louis Hjelmslev, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Roman Jakobson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, André Leroi-Gourhan, and William Warburton. The book has been called a foundational text for deconstructive criticism.

The work was initially submitted by Derrida as a Doctorat de spécialité thesis (directed by Maurice de Gandillac) under the title De la grammatologie : Essai sur la permanence de concepts platonicien, aristotélicien et scolastique de signe écrit (Of Grammatology: Essay on the Permanence of Platonic, Aristotelian and Scholastic Concepts of the Written Sign). His submission was unsuccessful. 

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is no out-of-context" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).  

Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words. 

 La voix et le phénomène: introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Speech and Phenomena) Presses Universitaires de France

In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida articulates his mature relationship to Husserl, putting forward an argument concerning Husserl's phenomenological project as a whole in relation to a key distinction in Husserl's theory of language in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and how this distinction relates to his description of internal time consciousness. Derrida also develops key discussions of the terms deconstruction and différance. Derrida commented that Speech and Phenomena is the "essay I value the most".^[2] Derrida's best known work on Husserl's phenomenology, it is widely considered one of his most important philosophical works.

English translations:

1973 -- Speech and Phenomena (translation by David B. Allison and Leonard Lawlor)
1976 -- Of Grammatology (translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)
1978 -- Writing and Difference (ranslation by Alan Bass)

Derrida referred to himself as a historian. He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture. By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism. [WP]