The colored squares below link to catalog searches for Derrida's seminars delimited by chronology. The irregularity of date ranges stems from the varying rhythm of Jacques Derrida's teaching.

Derrida began his teaching career in 1957 in Koléa, Algeria during his two years of obligatory military service. In 1959, he took a position teaching philosophy as a colleague of Gérard Genette at a high school in Le Mans, France. The first traces from the present archive date from this period. By 1960, he began teaching at the Sorbonne in preparatory courses for the Agrégation exam in philosophy. Handwritten teaching notes from this period reflect a variety of short lecture series (between 3-5 sessions), given throughout the same school year.

From 1964, after he began teaching philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, the seminars began to lengthen. Their objects and themes correspond to the yearly topics set for the Agrégation. On occasion, this aleatory imposition of subject matter was highly generative in Derrida's thought. For example, his reflections on “Donner – le temps” originate in the synthesis of disparate and seemingly unrelated objects on the Aggregation program of 1979: the theme: "Time" and Marcel Mauss's Essay on the Gift.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Derrida began to receive invitations to teach in the United States, first at Johns Hopkins University and then at Yale. His year was divided between teaching a preparatory course for the Agrégation at the ENS in the fall and then delivering a version of the same course in the US in the spring.

By the mid-1980s, Derrida had been invited to teach at universities around the world. Having taught, from 1960 to 1964, to the Sorbonne, and from 1964 to 1984 to the École Normale Supérieure, he moved from 1984 to 2003 to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, which was his main teaching institution in France. At the same time, he was invited to teach in some of the most prestigious American Universities as well. From the Fall of 1968 to 1974, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, from 1975 to 1986 he was a Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Yale, where he gave each year a regular seminar, and from 1987 to 2003, he gave several lectures at New York University and taught regularly at the University of California at Irvine.

In the early 1990s, against the backdrop of the fall of the Soviet Union and the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, Derrida's teaching took a radical turn toward an ethics and politics to come. From 1991 to 2001, his seminar took the title "Questions of Responsibility" and, in his final two years of teaching, Derrida undertook a radical analysis of political domination in the seminar on "The Beast and the Sovereign," which pursued a taxonomy of animal figures of political power.