authors announced, had made a career out of using “tricks and
gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists and the concrete
poets.”
The letter continued: “Many French philosophers see in
M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics
having contributed significantly to the widespread impression
that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an
object of ridicule....Academic status based on what seems to
us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the val-
ues of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, suffi-
cient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a dis-
tinguished university” (Points 420 – 21 ). In the end, Derrida
prevailed and was granted the doctorate, winning a majority of
votes from the Cambridge dons. The philosophers had lost.
Derrida’s academic audience was, by the nineties, far wider
than his discipline could account for. And he was in the pro-
cess of trying to widen it still more.
In April 1993 , Derrida gave a two-session lecture at the
University of California, Riverside, inaugurating a conference
called, punningly, “Whither Marxism?” The lectures became
Specters of Marx,published in France later in 1993. Quickly
translated by Derrida’s friend Peggy Kamuf,Specters of Marx
appeared in English in 1994.
Why Derrida on Marx, in 1993? As Richard Wolin and
Mark Lilla, two discerning critics of poststructuralism, have
suggested, Derrida’s constituency in literature departments
was gradually deserting him for Foucault: a thinker who, un-
like Derrida, was overtly engaged with history and politics.
Foucault had recently died, adding to the “halo effect” that
surrounded him and his work. By the early nineties, the New
Historicism, influenced by Marx and Foucault, became the
dominant force in English departments, especially in the fields
226 Politics, Marx, Judaism