282 Derrida 1963–1983
Blanchot. It has to be said that Derrida acquired an increasing
mastery of the specifi c features of the American system of educa-
tion. After the seminar, which began at 7 p.m. and continued quite
late, several members of the audience met up in cafés such as George
and Harry’s or the Old Heidelberg to continue the discussion over
a glass of something.^40 The rest of the week, Derrida made himself
extremely available. One Yale professor underlined this point imme-
diately after Derrida’s death: ‘[H]e was a particularly charismatic
teacher who really changed the lives of a lot of his students.’^41 Many
of those to whom he generously gave so much of his time during
those years would soon be appointed to professorships pretty much
throughout the United States, often with his support, and would
foster the spread of his infl uence over the following decades.
A young woman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, played a decisive
role in the reception of Derrida in the United States. On arrival from
Calcutta in 1961, she worked on a thesis supervised by Paul de Man
before discovering, with real excitement, Of Grammatology. Spivak
devoted several years to this extremely tricky translation. When
she came to Paris in summer 1973, she met Derrida several times,
and asked for advice on the various diffi culties she encountered. In
1974–5, at Brown University, Providence, she gave a seminar on
Derrida on which was based the long introduction that she added to
her translation before it came out with the Johns Hopkins University
Press in 1976. This text, about a hundred pages long, and decidedly
more accessible than the work it prefaced, went on to be a manual
for generations of American students. Even though Spivak’s transla-
tion met with some criticism and had to be revised several times, Of
Grammatology achieved astronomical sales of nearly 100,000 copies.^42
In his absorbing study French Theory, François Cusset gives a
good description of the ‘crucial shift’ brought about by Spivak by
presenting Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger as so
many ‘proto-grammatologists’:
The Americans will henceforth see Derrida less as the hetero-
dox continuation of the philosophical tradition, or even the one
who dissolves its text, than as its sublime end-point, a sort of
empyrean of critical thought for which these German precur-
sors would have merely prepared the way. [.. .]
Beginning in 1976, what was as yet only a theoretical pro-
gramme will fi nd itself read, studied, and soon set to work
in certain graduate literature courses, especially at Yale and
Cornell. One began gradually to apply deconstruction, to draw
from it the modalities of a new ‘close reading’ of the literary
classics, and to fi nd in the latter, as though through a magnify-
ing glass, the mechanisms by which the referent is dissipated,
the content ceaselessly diff ered/deferred by writing itself.^43