In Support of Philosophy 1973–1976 281
of the desperate gaze I keep fi xed on this scene, which I know
too well, in some ways, I still have the strength – where do I
get it from, I don’t know? – of doing things, performing in it
(seminars, the Greph, publishing.. .). But every evening I tell
myself it can’t last.^37In 1976, in the United States, Derrida’s fame continued to spread
rapidly. In the words of Richard Rand, a former student of de Man
who became one of Derrida’s American translators:
The development of what was rather simplistically called ‘the
Yale School’ was mainly Paul de Man’s doing. He had a great
infl uence on his students, coupled with an extraordinary politi-
cal sense for everything that concerned relations between the
universities. He was ambitious in the noblest sense of the term.
In spite of his vast culture and the quality of his personal work,
he started to study under Derrida, as it were, as he immediately
perceived his greatness and guessed that he would be able to
shift the lines of force in the American academic world. It was
de Man who played the decisive role in getting Derrida known
in the United States. Like Derrida, Paul de Man had a combat-
ive, if not warlike, temperament. He regularly wrote in the New
York Review of Books, often very scathingly. ‘We must draw
blood,’ he would sometimes say. This taste for polemics also
helped to bring him closer to Derrida.^38Whereas in France the reception of Derrida’s work occurred
on the margins of university institutions, in the United States it
was within the top-fl ight universities, and via a set of more tra-
ditional mediations, that it acquired its legitimacy and started to
spread among a broader public. As the sociologist Michèle Lamont
explained in a celebrated article, Derrida’s success in the United
States was not a given: it needed fi rst to go through a ‘re-framing’
that transported it from the fi eld of philosophy to that of literary
studies, then to its dissemination across an increasingly far-fl ung
university network.^39 The context, after all, was completely diff erent
from the one that Derrida had known in France: the references that
were most widely shared by his fi rst French readers – Saussurean
linguistics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism – were
not part of the cultural baggage of his American audience. And
above all, the latter were not as a whole greatly acquainted with
philosophy; it was mainly through Derrida that they discovered
Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger.
At Yale, there were more students at Derrida’s seminar every
year, even though he spoke in French and discussed authors who
were not much translated, such as Francis Ponge and Maurice