Preface
At the age of eighteen, I became a follower of Jacques Derrida.
The year was 1980. The school was New York University, later
one of the American universities where Derrida taught regu-
larly, along with Yale and the University of California at Irvine.
My freshman writing instructor, serious-minded, bespecta-
cled, and slightly milquetoast, had come to NYU from Johns
Hopkins. Hopkins was the university where deconstruction, in
the person of Derrida, first hit the shores of America, at the fa-
mous 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man.” For honors freshman English, my instructor
assigned us Plato’s Gorgias,J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with
Words,and finally the pièce de résistance: Derrida’s essay “Sig-
nature Event Context,” a critique of Austin.
Austin was a sly, fastidious Oxford don who had been a
spy during World War II, and who wrote essays with titles like
“How to Talk: Some Simple Ways” and “Three Ways of Spilling
Ink.” For me, the freshman, he proved a consistent and sur-
prising delight: my first real taste of philosophy. I had dipped
into Sartre in high school and had been excited by his way with
intellectual melodrama. But Austin was something else again:
sneaky in his insights, blithely funny where Sartre was ex-