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In 1967 a 37-year-old lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris published three books in a single year: La voix et le phénomène, De la grammatologie and L’écriture et la différence. Jacques Derrida, born in 1930 in El Biar, Algeria, called his way of reading “deconstruction”, and within twenty years it was being taught in literature departments across America, where from 1986 he taught at the University of California, Irvine. In 1992 his nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge went to a vote. He published more than 40 books before his death in 2004. This guide covers his 13 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1962–2006 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jacques Derrida published more than 40 books. His best-known is Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967; English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1976), alongside Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena from the same year, and Specters of Marx (1993). Start with Positions (1972), three short interviews in which he explains his own terms; below you will find all 13 key books with their French and English dates.
Where to Start with Jacques Derrida
If you want him to explain himself first
→ Positions (1972) — three short interviews from 1971–72.
If you want the defining book
→ Of Grammatology (1967) — the argument about speech and writing.
If you want philosophy read through literature
→ Dissemination (1972) — Plato, Mallarmé and Sollers.
If you want his political thought
→ Specters of Marx (1993) — Marx after the fall of communism.
13 Jacques Derrida Books, in Order
Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry
Derrida’s first book: his French translation of a short late text by Edmund Husserl, with an introduction many times longer than the text itself. Husserl asks how a truth like geometry can be handed down through history; Derrida’s introduction dwells on the role writing plays in that handing-down, the theme of his 1967 books. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. (1978).
Speech and Phenomena
La voix et le phénomène, the shortest of his three 1967 books, is a close reading of Husserl’s theory of signs. Derrida questions the idea that a speaker hearing his own voice has meaning fully present to himself, before any sign gets in the way. Translated by David Allison (1973).
Of Grammatology
De la grammatologie argues that Western thought has long treated speech as the real thing and writing as a mere copy of it, and sets out to show how unstable that ranking is. The first part deals with the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; the second reads Rousseau’s essay on the origin of languages, and contains the sentence “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation (1976), with her long preface, made the book known in English; a corrected edition followed in 1998.
Writing and Difference
L’écriture et la différence collects essays from 1959 to 1966 on Foucault, Levinas, Artaud, Freud, Bataille and Lévi-Strauss. It ends with “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, the lecture he gave at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 that introduced him to American academics. Translated by Alan Bass (1978).
Dissemination
La dissémination holds three long essays. “Plato’s Pharmacy” reads the Phaedrus, where writing is called a pharmakon, a Greek word meaning both remedy and poison; the others deal with Mallarmé and with Philippe Sollers’s novel Nombres. Translated by Barbara Johnson (1981).
Margins of Philosophy
Marges de la philosophie opens with “Différance”, his 1968 lecture on the word he spelled with an a, and ends with “Signature Event Context”, an essay on J. L. Austin that started a long public exchange with the American philosopher John Searle. In between are essays on Hegel, Heidegger, metaphor and the origin of language. Translated by Alan Bass (1982).
Positions
Three interviews, with Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, in which Derrida explains what he means by deconstruction, différance and writing, and how his work relates to Marxism and psychoanalysis. It is the most direct way into his vocabulary. Translated by Alan Bass (1981).
Glas
A book printed in two columns in different type sizes: the left column on Hegel, the right on the writer Jean Genet, both winding around quotations and marginal comments, sometimes cutting words in half across pages. Reviewers called it experimental and obscure; others compared its layout to the Talmud. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (1986).
The Post Card
La carte postale opens with “Envois”, a long sequence of dated love letters and postcards to an unnamed addressee, set off by a medieval picture of Socrates writing with Plato standing behind him. The second half reads Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. Translated by Alan Bass (1987).
Specters of Marx
Spectres de Marx grew out of lectures at a 1993 conference in California called “Whither Marxism?”, held after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Against claims that history had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy, Derrida argues that Marx’s inheritance still haunts the present, and coins the word “hauntology”. Translated by Peggy Kamuf (1994).
Monolingualism of the Other
Le monolinguisme de l’autre is his most direct account of growing up as a Jewish boy in French Algeria, speaking only French, a language he says was never quite his own. Translated by Patrick Mensah (1998).
Rogues
Voyous, one of the last books published in his lifetime, examines what is meant by democracy, by sovereignty and by calling a country a “rogue state”, and develops his idea of a “democracy to come”. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (2005).
The Animal That Therefore I Am
L’animal que donc je suis, published two years after his death, starts from a small scene: Derrida, naked in his bathroom, being looked at by his cat. From there he asks how philosophers from Descartes to Heidegger drew a single line between “man” and “the animal”. Translated by David Wills (2008).
In What Order to Read Jacques Derrida
Derrida is easier to read once you know a few of his terms, so begin with Positions, where he defines them himself, then go back to the three books of 1967. Of those, Writing and Difference is the most varied and the essays can be read singly; Of Grammatology is the core argument; Speech and Phenomena assumes some knowledge of Husserl.
The later books, from Specters of Marx on, turn to politics, ethics, hospitality and animals, and tend to be shorter and more direct. Leave Glas and The Post Card until you know his method, since both play with the form of the book itself. Dates on this page are the French first editions; the English translations followed between one and fifteen years later.
A reading path
1. Positions (1972)
2. Writing and Difference (1967)
3. Of Grammatology (1967)
4. Specters of Marx (1993)
5. The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006)
Everything Else Jacques Derrida Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 8 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other books in English translation
8
8 books · 1978–1997
- 1978Spurs: Nietzsche’s StylesÉperons; translated by Barbara Harlow, 1979
- 1988Limited Inchis exchange with John Searle, first published in English, edited by Gerald Graff
- 1991CircumfessionCirconfession, printed beneath Geoffrey Bennington’s account of his thought; translated by Bennington, 1993
- 1991Given Time: 1. Counterfeit MoneyDonner le temps; translated by Peggy Kamuf, 1992
- 1994Politics of FriendshipPolitiques de l’amitié; translated by George Collins, 1997
- 1994Force of LawForce de loi; the English essay, translated by Mary Quaintance, appeared first, in 1992
- 1995Archive Fever: A Freudian ImpressionMal d’archive; translated by Eric Prenowitz, 1995
- 1997Of HospitalityDe l’hospitalité, with Anne Dufourmantelle; translated by Rachel Bowlby, 2000
The years · 1930–2004
Quick facts about Jacques Derrida
- Known for
- Jacques Derrida is known for deconstruction, a way of reading philosophical and literary texts closely to show how the oppositions they rest on, such as speech and writing, unsettle themselves.
- 1930
- Born in El Biar, Algeria
- 1952
- Enters the École Normale Supérieure
- 1967
- Of Grammatology
- 1986
- Professor at UC Irvine
- 2004
- Dies in Paris, aged 74
- Born
- 15 July 1930, El Biar, near Algiers, in French Algeria
- Education
- École Normale Supérieure from 1952; agrégation in philosophy, 1956; a year at Harvard, 1956–57
- Taught
- Sorbonne 1960–64, École Normale Supérieure 1964–84, EHESS from 1984; UC Irvine from 1986
- Married
- The psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier, in 1957; three children
- Honours
- Honorary doctorate, Cambridge (1992); Adorno Prize, Frankfurt (2001)
- Died
- 9 October 2004, Paris, of pancreatic cancer
The red mark is 1967: Of Grammatology, one of three books he published that year.
How Jacques Derrida Writes: Reading Very Closely
Most of Derrida’s books are readings of other people’s texts: Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Austin. He quotes at length and slows down on a single word that does two jobs at once, such as pharmakon in Plato (remedy and poison) or “supplement” in Rousseau (an addition and a replacement). That double meaning becomes the point where the text’s own argument starts to work against itself. This, in plain words, is deconstruction: not destroying a text, but showing that the opposites it relies on, speech over writing, nature over culture, inside over outside, do not hold as firmly as it claims.
He also makes up or bends words to hold these double meanings. The best-known is différance: in French, différer means both to differ and to defer, and his spelling with an a sounds exactly like the ordinary word différence, so the change can only be seen in writing, not heard. The idea behind it is that meaning never arrives complete in one word, but depends on its differences from other words and is always postponed.
From the 1970s he experimented with the form of the book: two columns in Glas, love letters in The Post Card, an autobiography running beneath another author’s text in Circumfession. That style made him a target. Critics such as Roger Scruton and Noam Chomsky dismissed the work, while the philosopher Richard Rorty argued the obscurity was deliberate. The late books are noticeably plainer, which is why they suit readers who want his ideas before his games.
Watch
Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Laure Adler
Jacques Derrida talks with Laure Adler on France 2’s Le cercle de minuit, broadcast on 23 April 1996, about how television and audiovisual media shape thought, freedom of expression on screen and his path in philosophy. In French. From the official INA Culture channel.
Frequently asked questions about Jacques Derrida’s books
How many books has Jacques Derrida written?
More than 40. This page covers 13 key books, from his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962) to The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006), and lists eight more in the bibliography. Several were published after his death from lectures and seminars.
What are Jacques Derrida’s books in order?
Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962), Speech and Phenomena (1967), Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972), Margins of Philosophy (1972), Positions (1972), Glas (1974), The Post Card (1980), Specters of Marx (1993), Monolingualism of the Other (1996), Rogues (2003) and The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006). Years are the French first editions.
Where should I start with Jacques Derrida?
With Positions (1972), three short interviews in which he explains deconstruction, différance and writing in his own words. Then read the essays in Writing and Difference before Of Grammatology.
What is Jacques Derrida’s most famous book?
Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967), his argument that Western thought has ranked speech above writing. Its English translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976) is how most English-speaking readers first met his work.
What is deconstruction, in plain words?
A way of reading a text very closely to find the pairs of opposites it depends on, such as speech and writing or nature and culture, where one side is treated as more original or more important. Derrida then shows, from the text’s own words, that the ranking does not hold. It is not a method for destroying texts or proving that nothing means anything.
What did Derrida mean by “there is nothing outside the text”?
The phrase, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, comes from his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Literally it means “there is no outside-text”. Critics often rendered it as “nothing exists outside the text”; Derrida later explained that it means there is nothing outside context.
Why was Derrida’s Cambridge honorary degree disputed in 1992?
When the University of Cambridge proposed to give him an honorary doctorate, some members objected, and on 9 May 1992 The Times printed a letter from eighteen philosophers, including W. V. O. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus, saying his work did not meet “accepted standards of clarity and rigour”. The university held a formal ballot on 16 May 1992, and the degree was approved by 336 votes to 204.
Which English translations of Derrida should I read?
Most of his major books have one standard translation: Spivak for Of Grammatology (1976, corrected edition 1998), Alan Bass for Writing and Difference, Positions, Margins of Philosophy and The Post Card, Barbara Johnson for Dissemination and Peggy Kamuf for Specters of Marx. The translators’ introductions are often a useful guide to his terms.
Is there a film about Jacques Derrida?
Yes, two. D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999) by Safaa Fathy was made with his participation, and Derrida (2002), by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, is a documentary portrait of him in his last years.
When did Jacques Derrida die?
On 9 October 2004 in a Paris hospital, aged 74. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002. The Animal That Therefore I Am and several volumes of his seminars were published after his death.
Footnotes
- Jacques Derrida — Wikipedia
- Jacques Derrida bibliography — Wikipedia
- Linked bibliography for the SEP article “Jacques Derrida” — PhilPapers
- Glas (book) — Wikipedia
- Letter to The Times, 9 May 1992, from Barry Smith and others
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”
— Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (1967); in English, “there is no outside-text”
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