Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

pulse of a writer like Celan: his need for an other, for someone
he can reach toward and make understand. Derrida’s more her-
metic version of Celan occupies an important place for him; it
suggests that our most intimate identity is finally illegible,
closed offfrom knowledge. The insistence that we remain un-
known means, once again, that the psyche is protected from
interpretation. Derrida resists psychology in defense of the (as
he sees it, necessarily hidden) person. The life story of Paul de
Man will put this Derridean idea to the test.
In the year 1984 , Derrida later remarked, “I traveled and
wrote the most in my life” (Counterpath 209 ). “In barely a few
months there was Yale, New York, Berkeley, Irvine, Cornell,
Oxford (Ohio), Tokyo, Frankfurt, Bologna, Urbino, Rome,
Seattle, Lisbon.. .” This was quite a fate for the young man who
had never spent a night away from El Biar, Algeria, until the
age of eighteen. Derrida’s ceaseless travel schedule was, per-
haps, compensation for the sense of provinciality he endured
as a teenager in North Africa.
Of all Derrida’s travels during 1984 , his trip to Yale was
the most significant. On this occasion Derrida gave a course in
memory of his dear friend Paul de Man, who had died in De-
cember 1983. As it turned out, de Man’s posthumous fate, the
scandal that would surround his name a few years later, was to
prove a pivotal event, perhaps the most significant moment in
Derrida’s career. The theme of the hidden self, alluded to in
Derrida’s writings on Celan and in his nonencounter with
Gadamer, reveals itself fully in his readings of de Man.
Derrida’s course on de Man took place on the top floor
of Harkness tower: one of the oldest and most fragile build-
ings on the Yale campus. A tiny, antiquated elevator spared
students and professors from the ascent up the long, winding
stone staircase. The faithful, de Man’s and Derrida’s, were


190 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger

Free download pdf