List of Thinkers Influenced By Deconstruction - B

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• Timothy Bahti: Bahti was a student of Paul de Man at Yale and later an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Michigan.
• Houston A. Baker, Jr.: Baker is an influential theorist for African-American literature whose work draws on ideas from Jacques Derrida.
• Jack Balkin: Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School and a renowned critical legal theorist. On his blog, Balkin said that deconstruction influenced his intellectual life.
• Geoffrey Bennington: Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. He has translated many of Derrida's works into English. Bennington co-wrote the book Jacques Derrida with Derrida. Jacques Derrida is a double book made by Derrida himself and Bennington in which the latter presents an analytic account of the former's work in the upper portion of each page ('Derridabase'), which Derrida then attempts to disrupt or outflank in the lower portion ('Circumfession').
• Fernanda Bernardo: Fernanda Bernardo is an associate professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), who has been developing her researches on the relations of deconstruction with ethics and politics. She organized the 2003 international colloquium "Jacques Derrida: A soberania/la souveraineté" (Coimbra) and is the scientific coordinator of the program "Jacques Derrida – Língua e Soberania".
• Robert Bernasconi: Bernasconi is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Bernasconi has written extensively on Heidegger, and has also written on Gadamer, Levinas, and Arendt, among others, recently pursuing an interest in race and racism. He has acknowledged and discussed the enormous importance of Derrida's contribution to the study of Heidegger.
• Homi K. Bhabha: Bhabha is a postcolonial theorist, currently teaching at Harvard University, where he is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language. Bhabha brings together the insights of deconstruction and psychoanalysis in his investigations of social subordination.
• Harold Bloom: Bloom is the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English and American Literature at New York University. In 1979, Bloom contributed to the influential Deconstruction and Criticism, a foundational text for the Yale School of deconstruction. Later, in a 1983 interview with Robert Moynihan, Bloom said, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology...There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do." In accordance, Slavoj Žižek has identified the mid-to-late 1980s as the period when Derrida's deconstruction shifted from a radical negative theology to a Kantian idealism. In 1989, Bloom eschewed any identification with the Yale School's technical, methodological approach to literary criticism. He stated that "there is no method except yourself" and observed that deconstruction as a mode of thought is best understood as unique to Derrida. In a 2003 interview, Bloom recalled that in his past he found himself "fighting" deconstructionists. In the same interview, he stated that the deconstructionists were his friends and that what interests him in language is the Absolute, a notion he shares with Yale School deconstructionists and the negative theology of kabbalists.
• Judith Butler: Butler is a prominent American post-structuralist philosopher and has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. She is Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of Butler's works have taken up deconstructive themes.