452 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida told him his life story: that of
a Jewish boy from Algiers who felt neither French nor Jewish, then
a penniless student endeavouring to force his way through the psy-
chological and social barriers of the world of Parisian intellectuals.^2
‘I have the deep feeling of not having written what I would like to
write and what I should have written,’ said the philosopher. In one
sense, everything that he had hitherto produced was, he said, a pre-
liminary exercise for his one true project – which he feared he might
never realize. ‘I know it’s not possible to write in an absolutely naïve
fashion, but that’s my dream.’^3
A few weeks later, Derrida had the honour of appearing on the
cover of the London Review of Books, which also provided a pen-
portrait of him. This time, it was to the University of Chicago that
the journalist had followed ‘the great Jacques’. He was mainly struck
by Derrida’s physical appearance: ‘Derrida is a short, compact,
energetic man. [.. .] His eyes are a fi ne light blue, his short hair pure
white. With glasses, he looks like an upper-level, not absolutely top-
grade French bureaucrat, an administrator in a colonial territory
[.. .]. Without glasses, he could pass for a French movie star, a mix
of Jean Gabin and Alain Delon.’ The journalist was impressed by
the elegance and clarity of the lecture he attended, an extract from
Given Time,^4 and admitted that he was surprised not to encounter
the impenetrable and abstruse character that he associated with
Derrida’s writings. He was especially struck by Derrida’s friendli-
ness and kindness, and impressed to hear one of his female admirers
say that he was also an excellent dancer.^5
When he had started using the term ‘deconstruction’, Derrida had
not in the slightest imagined that it would have such an impact – it
even became, if we are to believe François Cusset, ‘the most bank-
able product ever to emerge on the market of academic discourses’.^6
In Derrida’s own eyes, it was a conceptual tool, but not in the slight-
est ‘a master word’.^7 By 1984, he was already acknowledging this, in
a somewhat negative way: ‘Were I not so frequently associated with
this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the fol-
lowing hypothesis: America is deconstruction (l’Amérique, mais c’est
la déconstruction). In this hypothesis, America would be the proper
name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy,
its language and its place, its principal residence.’^8 Ten years later,
the hypothesis was endorsed when it became the title of a conference
at New York University: ‘Deconstruction is/in America’.^9
Jean-Joseph Goux – who had known Derrida well in France, but
then lost sight of him for several years before running up against
him in the United States (Goux had become professor at Rice
University, Houston) – was struck by the contrast between the
French Derrida and the American Derrida.