Derrida: Notes Toward a Memoir

We had quarreled some years back, so I was no longer in the loop. Still, I had known of Derrida’s illness for about a 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, a 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, a 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 “literary 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, a particular penchant for chiasmus that had worked its way from a 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.