460 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
be denied that he was trying to set up a network in the United
States and Canada. In this context, it was important for him to
maintain links with certain potential allies, even if they weren’t
intellectually all of the fi rst order. He knew he needed a lot of
people to pass on the torch for deconstruction.^28In a well-known article published just before the de Man aff air
broke out, ‘How to become a dominant French philosopher: The
case of Jacques Derrida’, the sociologist Michèle Lamont tried to
interpret Derrida’s American career in terms of the methodical con-
quest of a cultural market.^29 This almost militaristic vision needs to
be qualifi ed. Admittedly, Derrida’s behaviour in the United States
showed much more practical cunning than it did in France, but
he seems mainly to have benefi ted from a conjunction of favour-
able factors, as if deconstruction had arrived at just the right time.
In particular, the extent of his success needs to be seen in relative
terms. While the idea of deconstruction has passed into everyday
language and Derrida’s name has become extraordinarily famous in
America, his work has never spread beyond academic circles. None
of his books has become a real bestseller. Only after many years did
sales of Of Grammatology fi nally pass the 100,000 mark. His other
works in English, always published by academic houses, have sales
of between 5,000 and 30,000 works – perfectly decent fi gures, and
much more impressive than those in French, but far from bringing
Derrida into the mass market. And while Derrida was able to count
on several academic reviews in the United States – Glyph, SubStance,
Boundary 2, Critical Inquiry –, it was hostility that prevailed in the
main organs of the cultural press. The Times Literary Supplement
has always been very hostile to him, the New York Review of Books
even more so.^30
However, certain folkloric aspects of the wave of Derrideanism
cannot go unremarked. In French Theory ̧ for instance, François
Cusset relates that certain magazines on home décor were suggest-
ing that their readers ‘deconstruct the concept of the garden’, while
a comic book superhero had to confront ‘Doctor Deconstructo’.
As for the magazine Crew, it extolled the ‘Derrida Jacket’ and the
‘Deconstruction Suit’.^31 In the middle of ‘Monicagate’, Bill Clinton
himself used deconstruction in his own defence. Accused of lying
when he had claimed not to have had sexual relations with the
young intern, the President replied: ‘It depends on what the meaning
of the word “is” is’ – a typically Derridean utterance.
The author of The Post Card was rather irritated by this superfi -
cial fall-out from his work. And he really did not like Deconstructing
Harry, the Woody Allen fi lm that hit the big screen in 1997. The
allusion – which, symptomatically, disappeared in the French
version, Harry dans tous ses états (Harry’s in a Real Stew) – was in