Derrida died Friday at a Paris hospital of complications from pancreatic cancer, French radio reported.

''With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,'' French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement Saturday.

Derrida, who divided his time between Paris and the United States, where he lectured annually at universities, was perhaps the most controversial and daring philosopher of the late 20th century.

He first rocked the American academy in a 1966 speech that introduced deconstruction to the United States as a mode of analysis that sought to turn Western philosophy on its head.

Deconstruction gained a following on college campuses, most famously at Yale University in the 1970s and later at the University of California, Irvine. A notoriously difficult theory, it left an imprint on a number of fields, particularly literature, where scholars seized on deconstruction as the basis for radical re-interpretations of classic works of literature and philosophy. Gradually, disciplines as disparate as business, architecture, law and religion showed the influence of Derrida's ideas.

Although deconstruction's influence has waned, it penetrated even popular culture.

''Of all the philosophers of our time,'' Stanford University philosopher Richard Rorty once said, ''[Derrida] has been the most effective at doing what Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking the crust of convention, questioning assumptions never before doubted, raising issues never before discussed.''