Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

The eighties began for Derrida with a major disappoint-
ment. He had been nominated for a prestigious chair at the
University of Nanterre, where he would have succeeded the fa-
mous pioneer of hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur, who was retiring.
(Derrida had been Ricoeur’s assistant at the Sorbonne in the
early sixties.) But the support for Derrida was not unanimous,
and Alice Saunier-Seité, the French minister of education, de-
nied him the position (and, in fact, abolished the chair). This
failure stung Derrida, who dwelled bitterly on his rejection
until his death. He felt ostracized by the French university sys-
tem, which refused to give him the kind of professorship he
deserved (he was considered for other such positions after
Nanterre, only to be turned down). His response was to reori-
ent his academic life around North America rather than Eu-
rope. He had been teaching at Yale for a few weeks every year
since 1975 ; he now increased his presence in America, lecturing
across the United States. When J. Hillis Miller moved from Yale
to Irvine, Derrida went with him. At the same time, he began
teaching at New York University. Derrida was still preoccupied
with European thinkers, but his professional life had shifted to
the new world.
In this chapter I focus on Derrida’s encounters with three
of the European figures who drew his attention in the 1980 s,
as he settled into his new role as ambassador of advanced
thought, sent by the Continent to America: Hans-Georg Ga-
damer, Paul de Man, and Martin Heidegger. All did their work
during Derrida’s own lifetime; one of them was his close
friend. These three thinkers become test cases for Derrida’s
claim that there is something inalienable and mysterious about
the self, apt to be violated by an outside interpreter’s judgment.
Gadamer’s dependence on dialogue means, for Derrida, that
he fails to respect the foreignness of the other person. (This is


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 183

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