Of Deconstruction in America 459
him. He greeted freebooters, the dissidents of every stripe, and
those who might be called intellectual hobos, with openness
and generosity.^25‘It’s easy to feel that you’re a kind of Prussian general,’ Jean-
Luc Nancy once exclaimed to Derrida.^26 This was a dimension of
Derrida’s life that started to develop in the United States before
being extended to the rest of the world. As far as the author of
Limited Inc was concerned, there were friendly and hostile univer-
sities. He played hard to get over several years, for example, before
agreeing to give a major conference in Stanford, ‘The Future of
the Humanities and Arts in Higher Education’, which then became
The University without Condition.* He was also often in Chicago,
where he had several friends: at the university, he was always
glad to see Thomas Mitchell and Arnold Davidson, the editors
of Critical Inquiry; at the Catholic DePaul University, Michael
Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault were faithful translators as well as
friends. Other important places were Boston College, where John
Sallis taught, and especially the University of Villanova, near
Philadelphia. Here, in 1994, John D. Caputo created a depart-
ment of continental philosophy that was particularly receptive to
Derrida’s work: Derrida kicked off the proceedings with a major
debate for the opening session, later published as Deconstruction in
a Nutshell.^27
Of course, this cartography of academia was not written in stone.
As Jean-Luc Nancy points out,
He always saw battles to be fought, fortresses to be taken and
alliances to be made or consolidated. He very soon insisted that
we too should go to America – Philippe, Sarah, and I – and sug-
gested to Yves Mabin, head of the bureau of cultural missions
at the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs, that we be invited. It can’t- The fi rst letter of invitation sent by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, head of the depart-
ment of comparative literature at Stanford, was written on 23 January 1990. Derrida
knew Gumbrecht, who had previously been professor at Siegen, in Germany. This
did not make him any less reluctant to give a lecture in Stanford, even if Gumbrecht
assured him that his work was no longer greeted with hostility there. It was only in
1995, after fi ve years of repeated attempts that bordered on ‘academic harrassment’,
in Gumbrecht’s own words, that Derrida showed more enthusiasm and envisaged
that a ‘formula might be found’ to come to Stanford. In the meantime, his friend
Alexander García Düttmann had given a seminar on his work there, and reiterated
that his visit would be ‘a big gift for everyone, a real opportunity to be seized’ (letter
from Düttmann to Derrida, 24 April 1993). On 6 January 1998, Derrida agreed to
give a big formal lecture, which he fi nally did on 15 and 16 April 1999, to an audi-
ence of around 1,700 people, after being warmly introduced by Richard Rorty. The
packed day went off extremely well. Today, Stanford University Press is one of the
houses that has published most works by Derrida in the United States.