his thought, in spite of itself, is deeply personal: the thinker’s
intellectual existence cannot be isolated from his emotional
life. So this book presents an account of Derrida’s life, as well
as his thought—especially his intense attachment to his friend
Paul de Man, source of Derrida’s greatest misstep and profes-
sional trauma. Derrida’s resistance to thinking about the per-
sonal life cannot prevent biography (de Man’s as well as his
own) from coming back to haunt him.
Thanks to Derrida, college teachers and their students
deconstruct everything from meals to clothes to ideas. His im-
pact has been large; and his books can be fascinating, as I hope
to make clear in my account of his career. Derrida was in-
structive in his uncertainties, more so than in his lofty pro-
nouncements. It is my sense that the general reader, not merely
the adept in theory and philosophy, can benefit from following
the course of his work.
The culture wars are over and, in the universities, the the-
ory camp has won. In the larger culture, however, grave doubts
persist about the worth of theoretical work in the humanities.
Increasingly, there is a division between the academy and the
public, which knows little and cares less about the university’s
reflections on books and ideas (often seen, whether fairly or
not, as cultlike, obscurantist, and doctrinaire). If we are to find
a way past this impasse, we must learn from the central polar-
izing figure of literary study in the past few decades: Jacques
Derrida. In this book, I exercise the same vigilance that he so
often recommended, this time with respect to his own words.
xiv Preface