Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

IV


Gadamer, Celan, de Man,


Heidegger


merica is deconstruction.” Derrida’s pronouncement
certainly seemed to be true in the 1980 s, when he spent
much of his time lecturing in the United States. He
would land on a Saturday afternoon at JFK and
be met by his Yale colleagues Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller.
An enthusiastic visitor to New York, he loved Brooklyn
Heights and Poets’ Alley in Central Park. And there was the
desolate, stirring landscape of Laguna Beach, where he lived
while teaching at the University of California at Irvine. Invok-
ing Central Park together with the southern California coast,
Derrida wrote, “Almost out loud I speak to all the poets in
Poets’ Alley, cousins of my friends the birds of Laguna Beach”
(Counterpath 101 – 2 ). The 1980 s were in many ways the most
eventful decade of Jacques Derrida’s life, marked by his
transatlantic evangelism on behalf of deconstruction—and by
the posthumous scandals surrounding the careers of Paul de
Man and of Heidegger.^1


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