Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida's Personal Library

Early in 2015, the Princeton University Library acquired the personal working library of Jacques Derrida. The library consists of more than 18,000 published books and other materials representing a lifetime of reading. For more about the acquisition, see:
Princeton University Library Acquires Jacques Derrida's Personal Library

Access to the collection
To access the collection, which circulates within the Dulles Reading Room of the Firestone Library, researchers must register for a Special Collections Research Account. To register, please see the following:
Registration and Reading Room Access Information

After registering for a research account, material may be requested to view in the reading room via the request features of the collection finding aids:
http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/RBD1
http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/RBD1.1

Derrida's Margins. Inside the personal library of Jacques Derrida

The Derrida’s Margins project allows users to peer over the shoulder of influential philosopher Jacques Derrida as he read the books in his library. For Derrida, reading was an active process: as he read texts by thinkers like Rousseau, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Hegel, and Husserl, he recorded his thoughts in the margins. In Derrida’s in own words, the books in his personal library bear the “traces of the violence of [his] pencil strokes, exclamation points, arrows, and underlining.”
The project website features a deconstructed design that destabilizes standard web navigation by using links in the corners (or margins) of the text. Banner images draw on montage photos of the marginalia, while site icons reproduce Derrida’s squiggles and arrows. Underneath the playfulness, the project is founded on a custom-built database that models Derrida’s groundbreaking theory of deconstruction in his formal writing and private scribbling.