Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God
Samuel Weber‘‘America will have been my subject’’—it is almost in passing, and yet
with considerable emphasis, that Jacques Derrida makes this announce-
ment early on in a lecture that was to become the major portion of
Rogues(Voyous).^1 And yet the passing remark could hardly have been
more significant. America—in particular, the United States—always
held a special importance for Derrida’s work.^2 It was in American uni-
versities that Derridean ‘‘deconstruction’’ first began to establish its in-
ternational reputation, and it was also in the United States that the
backlash against deconstruction first emerged and then crystallized in
connection with the revelations concerning Paul de Man’s youthful
writings in a Belgian collaborationist newspaper. Whatever other effects
that affair had, it called attention to the political dimension of Derrida’s
work, an aspect that had been largely overlooked in its early reception
in this country. Whereas the social upheavals of the sixties and seventies
provided the context in which deconstruction emerged in France, its
reception and resonance in the United States tended, initially at least,
to be confined to the university. To be sure, the American university of
the late sixties and seventies had become a highly politicized place, but
its politicization was of a very different kind from that which prevailed
in Europe. There, the intellectual context in which structuralism and
poststructuralism, including the work of Derrida, emerged was domi-
nated by state institutions, including the universities, whereas in the
United States the very wordstate, in the singular, has always been re-
garded not just with suspicion but indeed as something of a foreign
interloper, an unwelcome guest in the precincts of American English.
Thus, although Derrida resolutely rejected attempts topositionhim and
his work in terms of established French and European political catego-
ries—in particular those of Marxist ‘‘materialism,’’ as in the series of
interviews published in 1972 under the titlePositions^3 —the political
PAGE 382382.................16224$ CH20 10-13-06 12:35:52 PS