minded students, who were less likely to use him for the ad-
vancement of their own careers.
Derrida “was always the Jewish Algerian outsider,” Fox
remembers, in contrast to his rather patrician, Ivy League–
bred disciple Hillis Miller. He made a point of his unusual ori-
gins. Once after class, during a discussion of scapegoating rit-
uals, Derrida took a staid group of students by surprise when
he swung his arm energetically in a circle over his head. He was
miming his grandmother’s performance of the kapparot,the
rite of expiation performed by some Orthodox Jewish women
during Passover in which their sins are transferred into the
body of a chicken that is first waved in the air and then killed.
The year 1992 brought the “Cambridge affair”: a dispute
over whether Derrida ought to be granted an honorary doc-
torate by Cambridge University. While this minor drama did
not match in intensity the turmoil over the legacies of de Man
and Heidegger in the late eighties, it was nonetheless seriously
disturbing to Derrida. Derrida had already received half a
dozen honorary doctorates, from institutions such as Colum-
bia University and the University of Louvain. But this time,
Derrida’s nomination for a degree set offa storm of protest
from prominent philosophers.
A letter opposing Derrida’s nomination for the Cam-
bridge doctorate was published in the Timesof London on
May 9 , 1992. It was signed by nineteen philosophers from a
number of countries and institutions, including, most promi-
nently, W. V. O. Quine of Harvard and Ruth Marcus of Yale
(who had opposed his lectureship there). The letter asserted
that “in the eyes of philosophers... M. Derrida’s work does
not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.” The peti-
tion noted that enthusiasts for Derrida’s work came almost ex-
clusively from outside philosophy departments. Derrida, the
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