Editing Jacques Derrida (section)

===Early works<!--linked from the 'Life' section-->===
Derrida began his career examining the limits of [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]]. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his {{lang|fr|diplôme d'études supérieures}} and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of [[Edmund Husserl]].<ref>The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title "Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl". English translation: ''The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy'' (2003).</ref> Gary Banham has said that the 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."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Banham|first=Gary|date=1 January 2005|title=The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, by Jacques Derrida|journal=Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology|volume=36|issue=1|pages=99–101|doi=10.1080/00071773.2005.11007469|s2cid=170686297|issn=0007-1773}}</ref> In 1962 he published ''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. In the interviews collected in ''[[Positions (book)|Positions]]'' (1972), Derrida said: 
{{blockquote|text=In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. ...this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of ''Speech and Phenomena''.|source=Derrida, 1967, interview with Henri Ronse<ref name="67RonseP5">J. Derrida (1967), interview with Henri Ronse, p. 5.</ref>}}

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;<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in ''[[Writing and Difference]]'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 278.</ref> this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of [[post-structuralism]].<ref name="Bensmaia05">Bensmaïa, Réda, "Poststructuralism", in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93.</ref><ref name="Poster88">Poster (1988), pp. 5–6.</ref><ref>
{{blockquote|... the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of [[metaphysics]], like the history of the West, is the history of these [[metaphor]]s and [[metonymy|metonymies]]. Its matrix ... is the determination of [[Being]] as ''presence'' in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – ''[[eidos (philosophy)|eidos]]'', ''[[archē]]'', ''[[Telos (philosophy)|telos]]'', ''[[energeia]]'', ''[[ousia]]'' (essence, existence, substance, subject), ''[[aletheia|alētheia]]'', transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.|"Structure, Sign and Play" in ''Writing and Difference'', p. 353.}}</ref>

The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become ''The Structuralist Controversy''. The conference was also where he met [[Paul de Man]], who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst [[Jacques Lacan]], with whose work Derrida had a mixed relationship.