SOURCE: de Vries, Hent. “Deconstruction and America.” In Traveling Theory: France and the United States, edited by Ieme van der Poel and Sophie Bertho, pp. 72-98. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, de Vries presents an overview of issues raised by deconstruction theory as it was introduced and flourished in the United States.]

Much has changed since October 1966, when the famous conference on structuralism took place at Johns Hopkins University, introducing the work of a remarkable group of contemporary French thinkers in the United States. The conference, which featured lectures by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, among others, had been organized by the newly founded interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It was intended to inaugurate a two-year-long series of seminars and conferences which “sought to explore the impact of so-called ‘structuralist’ thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies.”¹ This concise description of the basic tenets of the program hardly captured the actual direction of things to come. Already in their preface to the second edition of the symposium's proceedings, dated November 1971, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato felt the need to distance themselves from the—indeed, somewhat surprising—title they had given to the volume when it was first published in hardcover in 1970: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy:

Today we may question the very existence of structuralism as a meaningful concept, for not the least of the paradoxes generated by what has come to be known as the structuralist controversy is the fact that as an operative concept it is more evident in the language of its detractors and popularizers than in the express statements of those who are supposed to be its main proponents. … Although the intellectual inheritance was clear, with its preoccupation with articulated sign-systems and the repudiation of the hermeneutic enterprises of the last century, evidence was already available in the Johns Hopkins symposium of the ensuing moment of theoretical deconstruction. The spaces had begun to open, not only between neighboring camps but in the conceptual matrix of ‘structures’ itself.

(ix)

Much more than structuralism, then, was at stake here. And what has come to be known as poststructuralism—a phenomenon associated by the editors with the name and practice of “theoretical deconstruction”—would soon turn out to be more elusive and intractable, transformative yet difficult to grasp (and this not only intellectually, indeed theoretically), but also academically, institutionally, politically, and even geographically. If there was any ‘traveling’ of ‘theory’ in the case of ‘theoretical deconstruction,’ it certainly was not a fixed set of theorems that moved from France, or Paris rather, to arrive in America intact. Nor could the ‘ensuing moment of theoretical deconstruction’ in retrospect simply be said to have taken place first in France and then in America; and, it is hardly accurate to claim that it took place in America alone. What, then, had been the modes of this ‘reception’ of deconstruction “in America”? Can one still speak of ‘reception’ when the received finds its origin no less than the source of its originality not only in the assumed addressor but at least as much in the addressee? Should the very concept of ‘reception’ and ‘influence’ not be problematized by a more complex and paradoxical understanding of the logic of ‘inheritance’?

Many reasons could be given to explain why the departure from a seemingly original ‘conceptual matrix of structures’ was no accident at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear why from its very inception the reception of French thought and its absorption into poststructuralism was already marked by an internal or structural movement of transposition that in advance obstructs every attempt to reconstruct its intellectual history, to pinpoint its sources, or to predict its further displacements.

The fate and very phrase ‘deconstruction in America’ would confirm a certain logic of the supplement. The supplementary determinations that helped shape ‘its’ very concept and practice (if there ever was one, just one, indivisible, located in or imported into just one nation) could be said to have radically transformed ‘its’ seemingly characteristic features. Deconstruction, then, would be nothing outside or beyond the different forms and modalities of its transference.

In this contribution I will demonstrate to what extent the ‘history’ of deconstruction in the United States—a ‘history’ which was ‘effective’ in a way that eludes the hermeneutic paradigm, of effective history or Wirkungsgeschichte—has a special bearing on the paradoxical nature and different manifestations of ‘traveling theory’ notably ‘between’ France and the New World, ‘from’ France ‘to’ the United States and ‘back.’ The central questions I will seek to answer are the following: How could the ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction,’ more than any of the other intellectual interventions commonly associated with poststructuralism and la pensée 68, serve as a privileged example of la pensée voyageuse? Could this moment of theoretical deconstruction be said to exemplify a thought and an intellectual practice that are neither here nor there, which are if not simply nomadic, exiled, or migrating, then at least underway, forever on the way, or, as Derrida writes so often, always yet to come, à venir?² Would the geopolitical difference opened up by the geographical distance imposed by the Atlantic simply be irrelevant here?

In his opening remarks to The Structuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey seemed to suggest as much when he recalled that, from its very foundation at Johns Hopkins, the academic setting of the epoch-making conference had been conceived as a “community of scholars” resting

firmly on the ideal of an international exchange, on a transatlantic dialogue. Someone suggested, more than a century ago, that Daniel Coit Gilman [Hopkins's first president, who served from 1875 through 1901], at the time he was planning and staffing this University, was trying to say that for the intellectual life “il n'y a plus d'Atlantique.”³

But this apodictic statement—il n'y a plus d'Atlantique—is cited here as an extended welcome, a gesture of hospitality, rather than as a description of how things really are. Would we still be interested in construing a genealogy of this ‘intellectual life’ or in retracing its lines of influence, its patterns of responses, as well as the responses to these responses, if this geographical space and everything it entails or symbolizes were no longer there, or if it had never been there? Can thought, especially the thought that is said to “travel,” remain unaffected by space, especially by this most empty, or desolate, or even unnoticed of all spaces?

“DECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA”

The example of deconstruction illustrates that ‘theory traveling’ cannot be understood as the exportation or importation of a body of teachings in a neutral and homogenous space. Its fate was marked in advance by a historically, institutionally, and politically overdetermined trajectory whose end is not in sight. Derrida's Mémoires for Paul de Man, presented in part as the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California at Irvine, in 1984, set out by explaining why, after a long and painful hesitation, Derrida had finally decided not to devote his meditations to the subject of deconstruction in America, as he had been invited to do. “Deconstruction in America” had been the subtitle of a book published the year before, on the Yale critics.⁴ Ten years later, when, on the occasion of a conference at New York University on the actual state of deconstruction in America, Derrida was asked once again to comment on the intersection of the two terms, “deconstruction” and “America.” His stance had not changed. This time, it seemed as if Derrida's reservations had already left their mark in the very ambiguity of the title of the conference proceedings: “Deconstruction is/in America.”⁵ The slashed title hesitates between the language and the implications of ontology, of attribution and predication (“S is P”) on the one hand, and those of topography or topology, on the other. It also suggests that the one cannot be thought without the other. Could the signifier “America” and everything for which it stands cover the topics and the dislocations of deconstruction? And in what sense could this mapping of one onto the other help convey a “new sense of the political,” as the subtitle to the proceedings volume suggests?

Before taking up this question, it is useful first to return to Mémoires for Paul de Man. These begin by complicating the premise of any simple logic of ascription and influence:

Can we speak of “deconstruction in America”? Does it take place in the United States? First in Europe, and then in America—as some too quickly conclude, thereby raising the questions … of reception, translation, appropriation, etc.? Do we know first of all what deconstruction represents in Europe? … contrary to what is so often thought, deconstruction is not exported from Europe to the United States. Deconstruction has several original configurations in this country, which in turn … produce singular effects in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We would have to examine here the power of this American radiation in all its dimensions (political, technological, economic, linguistic, editorial, academic, etc.).⁶

Derrida suggests that only against the background of these “original configurations” could we understand the implications of the fact that deconstruction is often perceived by some Europeans—he cites Umberto Eco—as “a sort of hybrid growth,” “as an American label for certain theorems” (Derrida, 14). But the ‘hybridity’ of the phenomenon called ‘deconstruction’ might very well be that which constitutes it from within and in advance. Indeed, as a truly “hybrid growth,” it hardly allows a clearcut distinction between a given or imported set of “theorems,” conceived in Europe, and their supposed labeling under the heading “made in America.” Against this background, Derrida can claim that there is, properly speaking, no “proper place,” no “proper story,” for this phenomenon, this (“thing”) called “deconstruction in America.” For this phenomenon, more precisely the very phenomenality of this ‘phenomenon’ which does not let itself be reduced to a mere empirical phenomenon, “consists only of transference, and of a thinking through transference, in all the senses that this word acquires in more than one language, and first of all that of the transference between languages” (Mémoires, 14-15). It is precisely the introduction of this psychoanalytical notion of ‘transference’ (of Übertragung or transfert) that makes the transition to that most concise of all ‘definitions’ of deconstruction possible and imperative. Nonetheless, Derrida presents it with great caution, well aware of its provisional and, perhaps, preliminary character as well as of its risks: “If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d'une langue—both more than a language and no more of just one language.”⁷ This, then, would be the battlecry, the shibboleth, of deconstruction, rather than its axiom, its working hypothesis, or its credo. “Plus d'une langue—both more than a language and no more of just one language,” deconstruction would, by its very definition, resist any attempts to recuperate its meaning and effects, either theoretically or empirically, that is to say, in a definition: “more than one language” does not constitute a sentence, is not a proposition of the kind S is P. In the sense in which J. L. Austin understands meaning, therefore, this phrase does not have a meaning.⁸

As such, this ‘definition’—beyond or before all definition, strictly or properly speaking—should make us careful not to identify its ‘practice’ or ‘event’ too quickly with the gradual or abrupt emergence of a new French, American, or Franco-American paradigm or episteme: “there is no sense in speaking of a deconstruction or simply deconstruction as if there were only one, as if the word had a (single) meaning outside of the sentences which inscribe it and carry it within themselves” (Mémoires, 17).

In its originary and unending ‘transference,’ the phenomenon of “deconstruction in America,” should, as a consequence, be characterized by pointing to its “essential and thus uncontrollable overdetermination” (Mémoires, 13). In other words, in describing its past, its present states and stakes, the periodization of its institutionalization, to say nothing of its canonization, one would have to take stock of that which precedes and exceeds the forms of its theoretical ‘objectivation.’ But what, then, if anything, ‘is’ the “moment of theoretical deconstruction” mentioned and cited above?

Time and again, Derrida reminds us that ‘transference’ entails not only a process of linguistic or conceptual translation and that it involves much more and much less than a ‘work’ of mourning (or Trauerarbeit). In ‘transference,’ we are, first of all, dealing with a ‘love story’ which, as is known all too well, is also a story about an irrevocable loss before and beyond any possible expectation and calculation. Seen in this light, the point of deconstruction would not so much be ‘theory’ (poststructuralist or other); rather, it would be something—“some ‘thing’”—that lets itself be better approached in and through ‘theory’ than elsewhere or otherwise. As Derrida stresses in a different context, we are dealing here with matter that literature (notably ‘modern’ literature) accommodates more easily than philosophy, and which nonetheless cannot be reduced to mere literature.

Nevertheless, one could begin to describe a structurally incomplete series (or seriature) of somehow related ‘aspects’ that reveal its ‘reception’ “in America.” Derrida explicitly mentions them as “ethical aspects,” and acknowledges that it is often “in the name of morality and against the corruption of academic mores that the most venomous—and sometimes the most obscurantist—discourses are directed against deconstruction.” This “does not exclude the faith, the rigorous ethical sense, and even what we might call the Puritan integrity of certain partisans of deconstruction).” Secondly, and more intriguingly, Derrida recalls its “religious aspects,” meaning that

it is impossible to understand American forms of deconstruction without taking into account the various religious traditions, their discourses, their institutional effects, and above all their academic effects; while opposition to deconstruction is often made in the name of religion, we see at the same time the development of a powerful, original, and already quite diversified movement that calls itself ‘deconstructive theology.’

(Mémoires, 16)

Perhaps the most striking fact about this series of multiple determinations, to which others, such as political or technological ambivalences, could and should be added, is that they are all analyzed in the light of their “academic aspects.” It is this circumstance that causes Derrida to conclude that, ‘in America’ and elsewhere “deconstruction is also, and increasingly so, a discourse and a practice on the subject of the academic institution, professionalization, and departmental structures that can no longer contain it” (Mémoires, 16).

What does it mean for deconstruction to revolve around the academic institution, and this “increasingly so”? What does it mean, moreover, that the institutional character of the university cannot be regarded as fundamentally philosophic or theoretical in nature? Before answering these questions, it is appropriate first to reconsider the different stages that have helped to prepare it, form its background, and determine the present stakes involved.

WAVES AND WAKES

After at least three different ‘waves’ of deconstruction, which neither simply washed ashore nor sprung up in America ‘itself,’ a phase has been reached in which deconstruction, as some untiringly point out, seems in the process of ‘phasing out.’ After an initial phase dominated by theoretical aspirations of literary scholars, after the philosophical rebuttal of this first appropriation in view of quasi-transcendental infrastructures, and after the attempt to address its singular ethico-political and quasireligious stances, a certain malaise seems to announce itself. How should we understand this supposedly imminent disappearance of deconstruction as an easily identifiable theoretical and institutional project?

In a provocative meditation, Barbara Johnson describes this constellation in terms of The Wake of Deconstruction, a title that evokes at least three different meanings and thereby, once more, plus d'une langue. The “wake” not only “allude[s] to a service for the not-yet-buried dead, but also to the expanding wedge of ruffled water that results from the passage of a ship (or whale) and also, somewhat less grammatically, to a state of non-sleep.”⁹

In the wake of deconstruction, Johnson suggests, we find ourselves in an ambiguous state in which mourning and alertness follow and condition each other. This condition and conditioning would result from the peculiar presence and ‘practice’ of a mode of ‘thinking’ of which it is difficult, indeed impossible, to decide whether it was not moribund, death-bound, or dead-born from the very start, or whether, as dead, it still lives on, haunting those who are unable to come to terms with its apparent survival and its no less apparent demise. “Perhaps,” Johnson notes, “the death of deconstruction [was] inescapable because deconstruction makes it impossible to ground thinking in any simple concept of ‘life’” (Wake of Deconstruction, 19).

From the very moment of its inception and reception, deconstruction would already have had to submit ‘itself’ to a process of ‘writing,’ ‘archivization,’ and ‘theoretization,’ by which it was also inevitably displaced and exposed to a certain death. This ‘self-difference,’ which affects the very determination and demarcation of ‘the intellectual life’, on this side of the Atlantic or overseas, would be inseparable from it.

Rather than “beaming ‘live’ meanings directly from one mind into another,” Johnson writes, all speaking and writing would have to “use” and, for that matter, institute “conventional, external (‘dead’) ‘systems of signs,’ resorting to language and to more than (one) language” (Johnson, 18). Johnson recalls Freud's “A Note upon a Mystic Writing-Pad” as discussed by Derrida in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference.¹⁰ Here, the analogy between the ‘functioning of the mental apparatus’ with a ‘magic slate’ would make it clear how the mind is composed of different ‘layers’ which protect it not only against “direct stimuli,” but at the same time enable its “responsiveness” and “memory” (Johnson, 18). Johnson cites Derrida who analyzes this paradoxical structure as follows:

No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral). But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in différance. The latter constitutes the essence of life. … This is the … condition on which we can say that life is death.

(Wake of Deconstruction, 18)

In Johnson's reformulation, this means that “with memory as its ever more complex constitutive structure … the ‘living’ psyche derives its specificity from its own ‘dead’ traces” (Wake of Deconstruction, 18).

This also applies to the psyche as it ‘thinks through transference.’ Deconstruction as a “thinking through transference” could not claim any immediacy or pure intellectual life on either side of the ocean, before or after its purported ‘reception’ and repetition, “in America,” in the academy, or elsewhere.

What would this mean for the status of deconstruction as a ‘traveling theory’? How would this help to situate the wake of deconstruction in its relation to the university and to the phenomenon of ‘theory’? To answer this question, one should, first of all, establish what precisely has been the movement of the intellectual tide that has made possible the present state of the wake—in all its ambiguity of wakefulness and mourning. Only then will we be able to raise yet another, more difficult question: What does this wake make possible, in turn? For is it not precisely the circumstance that deconstruction was never quite alive which explains that it will never truly die either? And is this not the reason why its much discussed wake might well be the very form of its ‘promise’, of its ‘future’? If this were the case, no historical or sociological analysis could make up its balance, store it in an archive, or write its obituary without, at the same moment, presupposing or reinventing what it thus seeks to neutralize, to appropriate, or to exorcise. As such, these analyses could never claim or hope to synchronize deconstruction's essential or structural anachrony, diachrony, or indeed its dia-anachrony. Deconstruction would continue to cast its shadow over all theories about its genealogy, its present place in the university, its future, or its presumed end.

It is perhaps no accident that Derrida rearticulates the question of deconstruction's relation to mourning and the wake (its own and that of others) in a keynote address presented at a conference in New York devoted to the question that interests us here. He explains the difficulty of determining the fate of deconstruction in or, for that matter, as America, as follows:

It remains necessary, no doubt, to attempt to analyze the becoming, the genesis, and the decline of what is thus reduced to a fashion, a school of thought, an academic current, or a method. But even there where they do not fall into unfortunate stereotypes, even there where they are more rigorous and more lucid, these historico-sociological analyses encounter several limits: a) they miss the most acute aspect of deconstruction, that which exceeds, in their very deconstructibility, the themes, objects, methods, and especially the axiomatics of this historical or sociological knowledge; b) they already incorporate and import from deconstruction what they attempt to objectify; c) they most often resemble performatives disguised as constatives: they would like to make happen what they claim to describe in all neutrality. For more than twenty-five years, in fact, we have been told that deconstruction is dying or that it is ‘on the wane.’ And in a certain way this is true! Since it has been true from the beginning, and that's where the question is, since deconstruction begins by being in poor shape (being out of joint) and even by dying, since all that anyone talks about, one must stop believing that the dead are just the departed and that the departed do nothing. One must stop pretending to know what is meant by ‘to die’ and especially by ‘dying.’ One has, then, to talk about spectrality.¹¹

It is at this point that Derrida returns to his earlier reading of Hamlet, in Specters of Marx, in particular to his fascination with the phrase that more than anything else evokes a “madness about dates,” to wit: “The time is out of joint.” Hamlet who pronounces this sentence is “the heir of a specter concerning which no one knows any longer at what moment and therefore if death has happened to him” (30). And this temporal structure, which is also a structural diachrony or, more precisely still, a contretemps, seems to reveal the very conception, the filiations, and the purported waning of deconstruction as well. And this not only “in America”:

The diagnoses and the prognoses are here at once more true and (as many signs also attest) less true than ever. This implies that the teleological schema (birth, growth, old age, sickness, end or death) can be applied to everything, and to everything about deconstruction, except, in all certitude and in the mode of a determinate knowledge, to that which in it begins by questioning, displacing, and dislocating the machine of this teleology, and this opposition between health and sickness, normality and anomaly, life and death.

(“Time Is Out of Joint,” 30-31)

As Derrida's invocation of the specters of Hamlet reminds us, the traditional—the historical, philological, at any rate monoor multidisciplinary—‘scholar’ is neither at ease nor sufficiently vigilant to respond to the uncanny injunctions of this night of the living dead in which our most common distinctions fade away in a gray zone, and this even to the point of collapsing in on themselves. Traditional scholarship, Derrida suggests, wants deconstruction either alive or dead. Tertium non datur. The exclusivity of this principle of the excluded third explains its unbelief and its intolerance vis-à-vis this ‘phenomenon’ that lives on by outliving itself, against all odds:

A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and not-being (“to be or not to be,” in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity.¹²

Marx, Derrida suggests, was the only ‘scholar’ who, in his best moments, did not shy away from addressing the specter. Marx—a certain Marx, at least—could be said to have sketched out the contours of any future hauntology (hantologie) that would manifest itself, not so much as a theoretical critique, but as a vigilant discourse on the vigils—indeed, all the future wakes—of thought. Needless to say, such an “hauntology” is, in turn, not confined to one discipline or one canon, nor is it simply, directly, or immediately theoretical. Derrida takes the ‘category’ of ‘hauntology’ to be “irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative ontotheology” (Specters of Marx, 51). If anything, it would resemble a “dimension of performative interpretation, that is of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets” (Specters of Marx, 51). Derrida continues that this comes down to adopting a “definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach” (Specters of Marx, 51). On this reading, truly or responsibly to interpret ‘the world’ means ipso facto to ‘change’ it, and vice versa. And all ‘theory’—notably all academic, that is mono-, multi-, and interdisciplinary scholarship—tends to forget this. Inevitably, or by its very definition. Deconstructive, indeed, is the ‘moment’ of ‘theoretical deconstruction.’ But what is this ‘moment’ before and beyond its determination as a dialectical, historical, or temporary stage or, for that matter, momentum?

One is tempted here to invoke the remark with which Derrida reminds us that he has “often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is—far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated—at bottom what happens or comes to pass [ce qui arrive]. It remains, then, to situate, localize, determine what happens with what happens, when it happens. To date it.”¹³ This last sentence supplements what could otherwise be all too easily misread as a mere quasi-ontological inquiry into the abysmal and shifting ‘grounds’ of knowledge and ‘theory’. More than that deconstruction consists in a pre- and post-discursive practice or intervention, and this, first of all, in the academy.

BEFORE AND BEYOND ‘THEORY’

One of the most debated truisms of the past few decades might well be that the modern academy is marked by a certain malaise. In an elliptical reading of Kant, entitled, “Mochlos—ou le conflit des facultés,” Derrida introduces the term malaise in the larger context of a wide-ranging diagnosis. He suggests that the dominance of a certain philosophical interpretation of the university as a concept has contributed to the seemingly omnipresent feeling of discontent with respect to its task and future.

Derrida characterizes this apparently general sentiment as a profound malaise, or even mal-être, in order to stress that much more than an intra-institutional or regional crisis (intramural or curricular, disciplinary or even interdisciplinary) seems at stake here.¹⁴ The malaise in question, he implies, does not let itself be simply reduced to the debates on the transformation of the humanities, of philosophy, of literary and cultural studies and their respective canons in the light of ever more rapidly emerging competing paradigms, some of which have come to dominate the academic scene in the United States, and, less dramatically, in Europe. Provided there is such a thing as a single localizable place for this sickness unto being called mal-être, the malaise has to be situated elsewhere.

Derrida locates the malaise in the paradoxes and aporias that haunt the principle of reason and, most significantly, its articulation into supposedly separated domains, such as that of the theoretical and the practical, the constative and the performative, the quest for truth and the need to act, as well as the scholarly and the public. The malaise would be produced by the tense, contorted relation between Enlightenment and politics that defines the academy at least since Kant.

The English version of “Mochlos” was published for the first time as the introductory chapter of a volume of essays presented at a conference devoted to “Our Academic Contract: The Conflict of Faculties in America” (University of Alabama, 1987). Derrida's text, however, was first delivered as a lecture at Columbia University, in 1980, on the occasion of the centenary of the founding of its graduate school. It was later republished in its original version in Du droit à la philosophie, a book which documents what is perhaps Derrida's most explicit institutional (if not his most political) work to date. It collects lectures, reports, notes, an interview, as well as an extensive, newly written introduction, all centering on a single theme. This theme, Derrida stresses, does not simply consist in a recollection, once more, of the task that has been engaged under (or in) the name of ‘deconstruction,’ in France, America, and elsewhere. Rather, what is at stake in this volume of more than six hundred pages is to describe in what sense this critical engagement of deconstruction “obliges” us to rethink the institution, most notably the “institution of philosophy” (Du droit, 29), and this “to the point of asking oneself what founds or, rather, engages the value of critical interrogation” (Du droit, 108). More in particular, this work would pose the question as to what precisely constitutes or determines our present responsibility ‘in’ and ‘for’, as well as ‘before’, that relatively new and typically Western institution called the university.

Along the lines of his reading of Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties, Derrida, in his contribution to the 1987 conference devoted to “The States of ‘Theory,’” argues that the phenomenon of deconstruction and the theory with which it is often, and often overhastily identified, cannot claim any proper institutional place for itself.

In this, it could be suggested, it resembles the ‘lower faculty’, the faculty of philosophy of the Kantian academy, the heart of the modern university, which, as Derrida demonstrates in “Mochlos” and in some other pieces collected in Du droit à la philosophie, has to operate on both sides of the line that is said to demarcate the theoretical and the practical, the constative and the performative, the university's inside and its outside. Just as only the paradoxical position of the lower faculty of philosophy can promise a reversal and displacement of the existing hierarchical order, deconstruction and theory seem all the more effective or, rather, the more responsible, the more they acquiesce in their paradoxical marginality and affirm a certain aporetics.

Perhaps no better illustration of this aporetics can be given than the ones Derrida provides in the aforementioned commemorational and inaugural lecture. Here, Derrida explains what it means for deconstruction to revolve in all its central aspects around the institution, notably that of the university, and, more precisely still, around the institution of this institution. Here, too, Derrida explains how the double meaning of the word institution—as a founding “act” and as a founded edifice—is related to philosophy, to the institution of philosophy, without necessarily being in itself strictly or even primarily philosophical. And, if ‘theory’ as well as the academy in which it takes part must be understood as being instituted, this means that it is the effect of an instantiation that no longer lets itself be comprised within the logic of what it is said to found. Therefore, the institution of theory is never philosophical, academic or, for that matter, theoretical as such. And this could be said a fortiori of the injunction which, in turn, calls the said institution (or the institution of its institution, of its academic edifice) into being.

Before even differentiating between so-called theory and deconstruction as well as deconstructionism, Derrida notes in the 1987 Irvine lecture that theory is not “a scientific theory; it isn't a theorization or a set of theorems”; moreover, theory is not a philosophy, in Kant's or any other generally accepted sense:

No philosopher—stricto sensu—in no tradition and in no philosophical institution of the world, including this country [America], will recognize [the] concept of ‘theoria’ or of theoretics in what is done, said, published under the name of ‘theory’ in some American departments of literature.¹⁵

Also, if theory does not follow the rules of any known episteme or paradigm, without, therefore, being reducible to the realm of mere doxa; if theory does not stand for “a theory” in particular, then this formula (theory or, if you like, the ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction’) comes to stand for nothing but “the opening of a space, the emergence of an element in which a certain number of phenomena usually associated with literature will call for trans-, inter-, and above all ultra-disciplinary approaches, which, up to now, met nowhere, in no department, in no area of any discipline” (“Some Statements,” 82).

The reason why this “exportation of discourses outside of their field,” which is also their “mutation” (83) cannot, does not, must not want to claim the title of a “science or a philosophy” is because

it has been accompanied, carried on, provoked, penetrated (… no classical schema of causality seems relevant here) by a form of questioning and writing … which destabilized the axiomatics, the founding and organizing schemas of science and philosophy … that allowed one to think this new configuration in the mode of self-consciousness.

(“Some Statements,” 83; italics added)

Derrida proposes to think of this “irreducible emergence” as an “effect” of deconstruction, which affects not only the theses and methodologies of science and philosophy, but also, more significantly, the epistemological or theoretical claims of literary criticism (whether that of “New Criticism, formalism, thematism, classical or Marxist historism”), as well as the steady institutionalization of those discourses which belong to “theory”: the neo- and poststructuralisms, the linguistically informed versions of psychoanalysis, feminism, to name only a few.

Rather than belonging to any of the isms, rather than indicating a school of thought of its own, the word deconstruction would stand for the “principle of dislocation” to which all the aforementioned disciplines remain forever subjected. This principle could itself, in turn, neither be located nor dislocated. Deconstruction would be undeconstructable. Rather than being a mere element of the ‘series’ of isms, the principle of deconstruction would, first of all, introduce into this series “an element of perturbation, disorder, or irreducible turmoil” (“Some Statements,” 84).

To describe this principle and its effects in greater detail, Derrida introduces a ‘quasi-concept’ which mimics and displaces Heidegger's notion of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) as much as it reiterates Antonin Artaud's subjectile, namely that of the jetty. In his use of this neologism, Derrida distinguishes, on the one hand,

the force of the movement which throws something or throws itself (jette or se jette) forward and backward at the same time, prior to any subject, object, or project, prior to any rejection or abjection, from, on the other hand, its institutional and protective consolidation, which can be compared to the jetty, the pier in a harbor meant to break the waves and maintain low tide for boats at anchor or for swimmers. Of course, these two functions of the jetty are ideally distinct, but in fact they are difficult to dissociate, if not indissociable.

(“Some Statements,” 84; italics added)

The first aspect of the word jetty is that of ‘destabilization’ or even ‘devastation.’ The second is that of stabilization, of ‘stating’ and of ‘stasis’ (“Some Statements,” 84). Even though every positive or negative formulation of the task of deconstruction would—necessarily—adopt the form of the static mode of the jetty, this very same form would still allow something else to be seen.

Any statement would betray that, as such, deconstruction ‘itself’ already signals the first ‘resistance to theory’, in the sense of theoretization. In advance, deconstruction thus takes the formless form of a destabilization and devastation of all attempts at stabilizing or erecting a ‘theory’ in thematic and static statements, which would allow one to define the state or the states of ‘theory’ and ‘theories’.¹⁶ This would be another way of saying that deconstruction resists theory because it is neither a positive or ontic science nor a totalizing system that has come to replace the absolute knowledge of speculative reflection:

it not only doesn't fix the text in a thematic or thetic station, a stanze, but it also first deconstructs … the hierarchizing structure, which, in philosophy, as a general metaphysics, a fundamental ontology, a transcendental critique or phenomenology, orders a multiplicity of regions, discourses, or beings under a fundamental or transcendental agency. The deconstructive jetty institutes itself neither as a regional theory (for example, literature) nor as a theory of theories. It is in this way that it is a form of resistance.

(“Some Statements,” 86)

This resistance is the concrete, indeed ethico-political form of the rest, the remaining or remaindering or restance which Derrida articulates throughout his writings. It does not consist in taking a position “against theory,” for in its primary gesture it precedes or exceeds all positioning, theoretical and otherwise. And this is the sole reason that this resistance is, paradoxically, in a position to solicit, evoke, and provoke the ‘hyperactivity’ of theoretical repositioning that has marked the academy since the late 1960s and which interests us here.

This repositioning, in turn, resists the resistance that had called it into being: “This time the resistance institutes—it is indeed essentially instituting—the consolidating and stabilizing structure of the jetty” (88). It can do so with more success by being more or less to the point and thus more or less responsible, as the following quotation demonstrates. But nothing is guaranteed here:

The … stabilizing jetty which resembles the destabilizing jetty most, is what is called poststructuralism, alias deconstructionism. It's not bad. It isn't an evil, and even if it were one, it would be a necessary evil … there is deconstructionism in general each time that the destabilizing jetty closes and stabilizes itself in a teachable set of theorems.

(88)

This second moment and mode of the jetty is thus to be regarded as both inevitable and “risky” (89), it cannot be avoided, but it is always in danger of perverting the first. Inevitable, indeed necessary, but no less risky, would therefore be any attempt to stress the philosophical or theological underpinnings of deconstruction, its preoccupation with infrastructures or with the quasi-transcendental, no less than, for example, its interest in the mystical, the tradition of negative theology. All this is not to say that Derrida would insist on making

a distinction between the destabilizing jetty (for example deconstructions) and the stabilizing jetty (for example, the reappropriations and the reactions in the form of deconstructionism, Marxist or new historicist theories, or discourses ‘against theory’), as a distinction between the movement which gives momentum, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the inert fallout which, in a style that would remind us of Bergson, would take momentum and life [for example, the “intellectual life”] back down, towards inert solidity.¹⁷

The relation between the two contradictory and, at bottom, incommensurable moments or modes of the jetty should be described completely otherwise, for example with reference to a singular “topology.” For whereas the ‘stabilizing jetty’ is a ‘station’ or edifice that ‘stands’, ‘institutes’, ‘erects’, and, indeed, ‘edifies’, the ‘destabilizing jetty’, Derrida writes, “neither goes up nor down … it may well not go anywhere.”¹⁸ It thus follows a different movement than the reversal of high and low hoped for by Kant. And it would pay for this dubious ‘freedom’ by having even less “status,” institutional or otherwise, than the philosopher in his conflict with the faculties. Unlike the well-known forms of historical or social critique, and with more consequence and rigor, deconstructions would forge their path by way of what has been termed the “passage through the transcendental.”¹⁹ This passage could not hope to bring this thought somewhere else. For, among other things, it consists in the experience of a wandering (rather than marching) through the institutions, revisiting the acts of their foundation, and reenacting these acts in events of commemoration.

Neither low nor high, neither left nor right, the destabilizing jetty of deconstruction could not even be said to have “existence,” in any strict sense of the word: “There is no manifesto for it, no manifestation as such” (93). All this explains why Derrida concludes on an ironic note by acknowledging that the adversaries of deconstruction are only too aware of this. He recalls a speech, reported to him, in which John Searle, “once he had explained his views on literature, announced to his audience that for twenty years deconstruction hasn't existed, or, more precisely, that it has consisted of … a ‘mist’ hiding everything” (“Some Statements,” 93-94). Derrida's response to this somewhat disingenuous, skeptical evaluation of the theoretical and institutional relevance of deconstruction is as consequent as it is disarming. Indeed, Derrida counters, deconstruction “has neither consistency nor existence, and besides, it wouldn't have lasted long anyway if it had. Especially in the States” (“Some Statements,” 94).

The ‘moment of theoretical deconstruction’ precedes its becoming an institution and a mere set of methodological rules. For this reason alone, it escapes all theoretization, all objectivation, all archivization. Deconstruction is the injunction of all ‘theory’ and as such no longer (or not yet) determinable in terms of the common analytical distinctions of the descriptive and the prescriptive, the constative and the performative, the academic and the public, and even the profane and the sacred. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this constitutive indeterminacy that makes all the difference in the world, institutionally and otherwise, “especially in the States.” Let me suspend for a moment my interpretation of this final supplementary remark and turn instead to some of the theoretical and practical implications of what has been discussed so far.

That the injunction of ‘theory’ is said to precede its cultural and institutional manifestations, no less than its conceptual determinations, is precisely what makes it at once vulnerable and invulnerable to critique and, indeed, to deconstruction. Vulnerable, since this injunction and the theoretical moment or momentum it is said to provoke must have the features of a merely spectral—non-empirical and non-historical—appearance, of an apparition, which has no direct observable and calculable effects. Invulnerable, since there can be no question of treating ‘theory’, notably the injunction of ‘theory’, as an academic discipline, methodology, or program among others. As a consequence, the deconstructive injunction of ‘theory’ would have never been really or fully part of the structuralist or, for that matter, of the poststructuralist controversy. By its very orientation, it would from the very outset have been forced to remain at a distance from the by now familiar debates around the academic canon, multiculturalism, and the politics of recognition, to say nothing of feminism, postcolonial theory, and the more widely accepted denominator of cultural studies. Or, to put it differently: deconstruction's relationship to these ‘transformations’ of the academic institution would be that of a ‘belonging without belonging’, their conceptual formalization as much as the intensification of their ‘tensions’ or aporias:

In the last two centuries, literary studies, and more widely, the humanities, have played a determining role in the self-awareness of the ‘great’ English and American universities. They consolidated exactly that which had given them their structure: national tradition, the works in the canon, the language, a certain social or ethnic hegemony, and so on. This situation is changing, as is all too clear. What is called ‘deconstruction’ is concerned with (theoretically) and takes part in (practically) a profound historical transformation (techno-scientific, political, socio-economic) which affects the canons, our relation to language and to translation, the frontiers between literature, literary theory, philosophy, the ‘hard’ sciences, psychoanalysis and politics and so on. … It is a question of assuming these tensions, of ‘living’ them as much as of ‘understanding’ them. Those who fear and wish to deny the inescapable necessity of these transformations try to see in deconstruction the agent responsible for such changes, when in my eyes it is above all else a question of trying to understand them, of interpreting them, so as to respond to them in the most responsible fashion possible.²⁰

This at least formal or analytical distance—a distance that is not simply or easily discernible at the empirical level—could be explained by pointing to what Geoffrey Bennington, in Jacques Derrida, calls the deconstructive “passage through the transcendental” (271). The latter betrays the phenomenological, Husserlian context of Derrida's earliest writings, but it continues to haunt the most recent texts (“Some Statements” makes reference to Husserl's “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” or “Philosophy as an Exact Science”).

It is the “passage through the transcendental”—which is a detranscendentalizing movement in its own right: a passing over of the transcendental—which explains why the deconstructive jetty must be distinguished from all the historicist or culturalist attempts to relativize or secondarize the very notion of ‘the transcendental’, as well as from misreading it as if this notion were nothing but a relic of metaphysical ‘transcendence’. Deconstruction claims that, in so doing, these academic projects are caught in exactly the same kind of performative contradiction they so desperately seek to avoid. Bennington describes this predicament as follows:

any attempt to explain transcendental effects by invoking history must presuppose the historicity of that same history as the very transcendental which this system of explanation will never be able to comprehend … it is the very concept to which appeal is made to explain everything that will never be understood in the explanation. That is basically the stumbling block of any empiricism whatsoever.²¹

In spite of—or thanks to—its turbulent reception in literary departments, through the subsequent appropriation by philosophers, theologians, architects, legal scholars and others, Derrida's work would thus circle back, not to some original point of departure, not to France, nor, to be sure, to some continental, European, style of philosophizing, irrecuperable by the American academy; but precisely to a being ‘out of joint’ that made it possible as much as impossible, moribund no less than vital, in the first place.

Needless to say, the statement and prescription cited above—“one cannot and one should not attempt to survey or totalize the meaning of an ongoing process”—could easily provoke the anger of Marxists or new historicists to whom one (rightly or wrongly) ascribes the endeavor of reclaiming matters like the relevance of ‘history’, the ‘social process’, or ‘the political’.²² Yet, interestingly enough, Derrida gives this anticipated critique all its due:

If deconstructionism were what it is accused of being, and when it is and where it is formalist, aestheticist, ignorant of reality, of history, enclosed in language, word play, books, literature, indifferent to politics—I would consider Marxism and new historicism absolutely legitimate, necessary, urgent. Moreover I believe in a certain necessity, sometimes in a certain novelty, if not of the theory at least of the style of investigation, and thus of certain objects or areas of research, of what presents itself under the title of Marxism or new historicism. … It doesn't seem to me that any rejection of these attempts is desirable or interesting. But as theories, this Marxism and this new historicism have at least one trait in common … in the present stage of their critique. It is that they institute themselves in reaction to a deconstructionist poststructuralism which is itself either nothing but a figure or a stabilizing reappropriation of deconstruction or else a caricatural myth projected by Marxists and new historicists out of self-interest or misunderstanding.²³

A difference and a conflict, therefore, remain. For, if it is stated that the deconstructive ‘jetty’ is intrinsically “motivated” by the call for history (92), it is no less clear that it must also begin by problematizing most of our dominant understandings of history, whether they are informed by Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, or the heralds of the end of history. And it must do this without falling, in turn, into the mere “archivism” or “documentalism” (93) of the historicisms, old or new. Here, again, the task of thinking would be to complicate the alternatives for metaphysics, on the one hand, and for mere empiricism, on the other. The deconstructive call for ‘history’ would be neither one for mediation or sublation, nor one that relies on the mere enumeration of facts. If anything, it could be said to retrace the implications and effects of a spectral logics of inheritance or, in order words, of a logics of spectral inheritance which is, consequently, the inheritance of a specter, in all its uncannyness and monstrosity, that casts its shadow well beyond any determinable past, present, and future.

Against this backdrop, we can understand why Derrida, in retrospect, can note that the Johns Hopkins conference of 1966 might well have had all the characteristic features of a seismic event rather than, say, a change of paradigm or the imposition of yet another episteme:

What is now called ‘theory’ in this country may even have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966. … What is certain is that if something happened there which would have the value of a theoretical event … this something only came to light afterwards and is still becoming more and more clear today. But what is also certain is that nobody, either among the participants or close to them, had any thematic awareness of the event; nobody could take its measure and above all nobody could have or would have dared to program it, to announce or present it as such an event. This is certain; and it is just as certain that if somebody claimed today to program or present a similar event, that person would be mistaken—no doubt about it.

(80)

This statement, Derrida acknowledges, has an unmistakable “prescriptive connotation,” but one, he hastens to add, that has to be circumscribed with much caution, for this “prescriptive connotation,” despite all its resemblance with a performative utterance, is not ethical or political in the strict sense of these words.²⁴ Nor, Derrida continues, is this singular prescriptivity, tied as it is to the injunction to invent and to do “less boring and more original things,” the expression of mere “taste” and “an aristocratic aestheticism”: it would merely affirm the fact that “something would finally have a chance of happening or taking place, that's all. It isn't certain, it isn't predictable—simply, it is better that something happen. That's all: that something happen, that's what is better, that's all” (80-81; italics added).

The injunction in question, then, would have to be situated before and beyond ‘theory’, before and beyond every ethicopolitical imperative or aesthetic practice. But no less before and beyond ‘all historical and social reality’. Is this possible? But why, then, does this reveal itself nowhere with more clarity and institutional effects than in the United States?

NOWHERE—BUT IN AMERICA

“Especially in the States.” Derrida's remarkable exclamation, quoted above, recalls the recurring reference, notably in his Mémoires for Paul de Man, to the difficulties involved in understanding the phenomenon of “Deconstruction in America.” In order to explain his hesitation to speak about this topic (directly), Derrida gives several reasons for avoiding the subject. First of all, he writes, “one cannot and one should not attempt to survey or totalize the meaning of an ongoing process. …”²⁵ ‘Surveying’ or ‘totalizing’ the phenomenon in question—‘surveying’ or ‘totalizing’ any phenomenon whatsoever—would mean to arrest its ‘process’ and take away its promise, its to-come, its à venir. Something, Derrida admits, which, as far as ‘deconstruction’ is concerned, he is in no hurry to do.

In the second place: “In order to speak of ‘deconstruction in America,’ one would have to claim to know what one is talking about, and first of all what is meant or defined by the word ‘America.’ Just what is America in this context?” (18). One could be tempted to think that deconstruction could have taken place nowhere else but in “America,” and that the formulation ‘deconstruction in America’ comes close to expressing a tautology. On this reading, deconstruction would even be another name for “America,” just as “America” would be a name, perhaps the most proper name for ‘deconstruction’.

And yet, Derrida distances himself from this confusing interpretation. If in a secret way deconstruction were to ‘be’ America, it would, as Specters of Marx suggests, be no less identifiable than ‘perestroika’. The significance of the latter was hardly that of a successful transposition of an American socio-political model onto its apparently obsolete Soviet-Russian counterpart. It was no accident, then, that his keynote address at the conference “Whither Marxism?”—which was to evolve into Specters of Marx—was less a scholarly exposition of Marx or a classical modern interpretation of Marx than a “political position-taking.” Derrida explains: “It was uttered first of all in America, but surely also on the subject of America, and doubtless, to an extent that remains to be determined, against a certain America in the new world order that is attempting to impose itself today.”²⁶ Here, the target would once more be engagement with the religious; for Derrida's target is, first of all, a certain “evangelicalism,” represented most vocally by Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, as well as by the advocates of the so-called New World Order. The latter are contrasted by a Marxian “messianicity” that is said to distinguish itself at least analytically from all concrete “messianisms” that have erupted throughout the history of the positive religions, notably the religions of the Book. Moreover, this Marxian “messianicity” would resemble a certain “Jewishness” that is characterized, first of all, by an “openness toward the future” rather than by an allegiance to any particular doctrine of faith, to any ritual, or to any geopolitically determinable location. It is this openness, then, that prevents the names of deconstruction and America from becoming each other's pars pro toto, that is to say, interchangeable. Instead of calling deconstruction and America each other's proper name, instead of determining them as each other's most proper name, we should, rather, view these ‘names’ as “two open sets which intersect partially according to an allegorico-metonymic figure. … ‘America’ would be the title of a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history” (32).

Nowhere—but in America. The very formulation ‘in America’, Derrida seems to suggest, is marked by an ambiguity that affects the very coherence of the topological determination it seems to provide. In the first place, Derrida writes, “if deconstruction is in America, ‘in’ can indicate inclusive as well as provisional passage, the being-in-transit of the visitor” (28-29). In the second place, the ‘in’ of the statement ‘deconstruction is in America’, reveals a further complication. That which is said to be ‘in’ America is, by definition, not itself America: “If D is in A, it is not A; if D is A, it is not in, etc.” (29).

What, then, would keep the fiction of ‘America’ alive? Especially, now that for the ‘intellectual life’ il n'y a plus d'Atlantique? And why, moreover, does this insight determine one of the most important features of ‘theory’, ‘especially in the States’? Clearly, one would have to avoid invoking here the common and at bottom stereotypical phantasma of “America” as an indeterminate, open, and endless space in which a transdisciplinary ‘theory’ can break new ground more easily than in the stratified topography of the ‘old world’ and its privileged institutions. What explains the supplementary remark—“especially in the States”—is, perhaps, the following.

Even if it is claimed that for the ‘intellectual life’ il n'y a plus d'Atlantique, it remains no less true that beneath the transatlantic airlifts, linking the American and the European university, there lies an ocean that is more abysmal in its depth and breadth than the gorge that surrounds the campus where Derrida presented his reflections on “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils.” Derrida makes much of the singular topology of the Cornell campus, whose gorge has to be bridged even though it, in all its deadly sublimity, is said to protect the essence of this university.²⁷

Something similar could be maintained for the relation France—U.S. as it redefines itself through “theories” traveling back and forth, “crossing frontiers,” as Geoffrey Bennington puts it, “in the airported style of a cultural and linguistic nomadism.”²⁸ To be sure, the theoretical movement of abstraction, of the formalization that is indissociable from the ‘passage through the transcendental’, is possible only on the condition of a certain desertification, of an endless navigating that seeks to traverse the distance between continents.

Yet, it should be clear from what is said above that ‘theory’, let alone the injunction of ‘theory’, is hardly a specimen of some ‘nomadic thinking’. The latter would conceive of the task of thinking by assuming the possibility of a being able to go elsewhere, to change places. Whatever its peregrinations, the ‘nomadic thinking’ would still somehow, paradoxically, presuppose the confines of a place, for example, of a given institutional context, with respect to which it seeks to situate itself, if only by opposition, negation, or denial. ‘Theory’, by contrast, and in particular the injunction of ‘theory’ that calls it forth or interrupts its inherent tendency to stabilize itself in a theory, operates along different lines and according to a different topology or topolitology. Deconstruction would not be a march through, let alone around, the institution, but the incessant renegotiation of its demarcations. Rather than exiling itself from the institutional space, rather than ignoring its intrinsic aporias, the deconstructive injunction would intervene in an institutional setting while continuing to displace its very structural limitation. In so doing, it could not only transform the conditions of the debate, but also (and, perhaps, first of all) analyze and enhance a transformation in progress or, so to speak, en route. As a traveling theory, deconstruction would have no premeditated destination; its destiny is nowhere in particular. And if this, paradoxically, is nowhere clearer than in America, then the reason for this is hardly that deconstruction is more at home in America than elsewhere, let alone that deconstruction ‘is’ America, or vice versa.²⁹

Notes

1. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, 2nd ed. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), xv.

2. Why, moreover, has Derrida chosen on more than one occasion to pursue his analyses—for example, those devoted to the relation of responsibility to the secret and to ‘figures of death’—with special reference to “‘American’ examples such as “The Purloined Letter,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” The Aspern Papers, etc.”? Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10n5.

3. Richard Macksey, “Lions and Squares: Opening Remarks,” The Structuralist Controversy, 2.

4. J. Arac et al., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

5. Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995).

6. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; rev. and augmented ed., 1989), 14.

7. Ibid., 15; translation modified.

8. Jacques Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” Deconstruction is/in America, 27.

9. Johnson, The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 17.

10. Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon a Mystic Writing-Pad,” SE XIX, 227-32 (first published 1924); Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in his Writing and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

11. Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 30.

12. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 11.

13. Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 17.

14. Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 403.

15. Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of “Theory,” History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carrol (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 81.

16. “Deconstruction resists theory because it demonstrates the impossibility of closure, of an ensemble or totality on an organized network of theorems, laws, rules, methods”; ibid., 86.

17. Ibid., 93; italics added.

18. “The destabilizing jetty doesn't go up. On the contrary, it is the stabilizing jetty that goes upwards. It stands; it is a standing, a station, or a stanza; it erects, institutes, and edifies. It is edifying, essentially edifying. The destabilizing jetty goes neither up nor down; it may not go anywhere; “Some Statements,” 93.

19. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 271.

20. Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 413.

21. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 281-82. Bennington goes on to argue that the ‘point’ here is hardly

    to endorse the structure whereby “regional” disciplines necessarily appeal for their legitimacy to a last instance—i.e. philosophy—even thought of as “fundamental ontology,” but to show how any attempt to unseat philosophy from a classically defined region can only replace in the final instance something which will play the part of philosophy … every system excludes or expels something which does not let itself be thought within the terms of the system, and lets itself be fascinated, magnetized, and controlled by this excluded term, its transcendental's transcendental.

    (283-84; italics added)

22. One might object that this account is in danger of resembling a strategy of mystification, according to which deconstruction would (have to) take on a contemporary form of mysticism. But the risk of the mystical and its mystifications is inevitable where, precisely, the question of foundation, institution, whether of the State, the law or the university, is at issue.

23. Derrida, “Some Statements,” 90.

24. Ibid.; italics added.

25. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, 17.

26. Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” 32.

27. Derrida also speaks of “l'abîme d'un océan” with reference to his teaching in Paris and at Yale, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 13.

28. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 332.

29. It comes as no surprise, then, that Derrida responds with reservation to the eagerness on the part of some to reduce ‘deconstruction’ or whatever is undertaken in its name to a predominantly American academic affair that is solely concerned with the formalization of certain principles of ‘reading’:

    Some very interesting things have happened in this regard in the United States. It would require long analyses—that I have begun here and there. But I am very suspicious concerning this very frequent and very interested calculation that consists in referring me back to the United States or putting me under American house arrest. What is one trying to do or to defend in this way? I leave you to imagine it. No, I spend only a few days, a few weeks in the United States each year. Whatever may be the intensity of this experience, whatever may be the generosity but also the aggressivity (you have no idea) that I encounter there, the things that count for my work are also going on elsewhere, outside of Europe, in Europe, and for example, yes, in France.

    (Derrida, Points, 351)