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5. Derrida’s America
- Fordham University Press
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5 Derrida’s America We have been edging ever closer to this theme from the beginning. It is now time to make the crossing and tackle it head on. This chapter thus looks not at Derrida’s Algeria, Derrida’s France, or Derrida’s Europe, but at ‘‘Derrida’s America,’’ that is, at the history of Derrida and deconstruction in America, as well as Derrida’s evolving relationship to and thinking about America from the early 1960s up through 2004. Though this might be seen as yet another imposition of American cultural hegemony, yet another claim to American privilege in the reception, interpretation, dissemination , and, now, the inheritance of Derrida’s thought, it is, as I will try to show, simply an acknowledgement of the unique role America played in Derrida’s life and work. For if, as Derrida himself once put it, ‘‘no theoretical work, no literary work, no philosophical work, can receive a worldwide legitimation without crossing the [United] States, without being first legitimized in the States’’ (EIRP 29),1 then we are simply acknowledging the facts when we observe that, while Derrida lived the first eighteen years of his life in colonial Algeria, while he attended university in France and subsequently taught for over forty years in Paris, it was really only in America, or only through his success in America, that Jacques Derrida, professor at the École Normale Supérieure and École des Hautes Études in Paris, came to be known, indeed renowned throughout the world, as ‘‘Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction.’’ In what follows I would like to remember Derrida by recalling his time in America so as, first, to confirm the importance of his thought and work 96 in and for America but then, also, so as to question some of the myths with regard to that importance. I will thus try to consider in the most straightforward way possible the impact or influence of Derrida’s thought on or in America, the fate, therefore, of ‘‘deconstruction in America,’’ but then, also, America’s influence on Derrida, the way in which Derrida marked but was himself also marked by American friends, thinkers, institutions , and issues. Finally, I will take up Derrida’s reading of America, his thoughts about America, and, in the very end, his way of relaunching the promise of ‘‘America,’’ his unique way of reinscribing ‘‘America’’— and ‘‘America,’’ as we will see, always in relation to a certain ‘‘Europe ’’—as the name of a promise. As a certain kind of American, then, I shall try to address the question of ‘‘Derrida’s America,’’ or ‘‘Derrida’s American Question,’’2 by answering in what I would call a singularly ‘‘American’’ mode, that is, with a series of unequivocal, unilateral, if not preemptive affirmations, a series of firm and unwavering ‘‘yeses.’’ But then, each time, and in a second moment , I will, as a certain kind of American, try to temper my affirmation and enthusiasm with one of those more ‘‘European’’ ‘‘yes, buts’’ or ‘‘no, and yets’’ that we discussed in the previous chapter—a form of bilateral thinking that I think Derrida believed to be the only way of thinking responsibly today, the only way of thinking responsibly whether in Europe or in America. Derrida in America Let me begin, then, with what are widely acknowledged to be the facts regarding Derrida in America, by which I mean, in this context, Derrida in the United States. Like many middle-class boys growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in colonial Algeria, Derrida was no doubt exposed early on and often to American culture, and particularly American movies. Indeed , his real or given name was, in fact, not Jacques but ‘‘Jackie,’’ after the California-born child actor of the 1920s ‘‘Jackie Coogan.’’ Like many young Algerians, then, he was familiar with a certain America or a certain image of America, and he would have no doubt come into contact with Americans in the early 1940s, during the North African Campaign to free Algeria from Vichy France. But what Derrida once called his own débarquement, that is, his own ‘‘landing’’ in America, did not take place until 1956–57, when at the age of twenty-six, having just passed the agrégation exam in France, he boarded a ship named the Liberté for his first trip to America.3 Having Derrida’s America 97 [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:58...