Derrida: Notes Toward a Memoir

Abstract

We had quarreled some years back, so I was no longer in the loop. Still, I had known of Derrida's illness for about year and was not altogether surprised to see the announcement of his death in the New York Times. Indeed the placement of the obituary on the first page struck me as altogether appropriate, kind of vindication of the intellectual labors and enthusiasms of the generation, my own, which had discovered his work in the age prior to its academic respectability. There was, after all, time, the early seventies, when the urgent task in American academia seemed to be to bring Derrida, and the whole Franco-German nexus that was to form the core of what would soon be misnamed theory, into English. The term deconstruction, of course, is now omnipresent in the culture. (Auden's line, on the death of Freud, about a whole climate of feeling comes to mind). And for years, I had found myself subliminally noting deconstructive touches on the op. ed. page of one prominent newspaper or another, trying to imagine in which elite university an author might have been exposed to Derrida's thought and picked up, say, particular penchant for chiasmus that had worked its way from long-since forgotten course on literature to his or her present writing. I was convinced that one could no more not be marked by an encounter with his thought than I had been. I was wrong, of course. The derisory, almost muckraking tone of the Times obituary felt like an ambush. The insistence that Derrida had never succeeded in coming up with anything less murky as characterization of deconstruction than its own impossibility showed, above all, deep hostility to the entire effort. Surely one might have served up, as guide to the uninitiated, say, Val6ry's quip that philosophy was literary genre among others, and the comedy (or tragedy) of philosophy was that philosophers were the last ones to realize it. That (and numerous other luminous one-liners) might have been found throughout the early Derrida, but one would, to be sure, have to have wanted to find them. It was, finally, the failure to reveal any inkling of new style of readerly complexity, the new obliqueness of coherence with which Derrida electrified much of generation of literary scholars, that was most disappointing. As though at certain level of obliqueness the screen