The Territories of Deconstruction 1984–1986 359
[D]eath reveals the power of the name to the very extent that
the name continues to name or to call what we call the bearer
of the name, and who can no longer answer to or answer in
and for his name. And since the possibility of this situation is
revealed at death, we can infer that it does not wait for death,
or that in it death does not wait for death. In calling or naming
someone while he is alive, we know that his name can survive
him and already survives him; the name begins during his life
to get along without him, speaking and bearing his death
each time it is pronounced in naming or calling, each time it is
inscribed in a list, in a civil registry, or a signature.^11The word ‘Mémoires’, which Derrida chose as title for the volume
eventually published in the United States, should be taken in every
sense, including the most literal (‘memories’). This homage to Paul
de Man was an opportunity for him to look back over his own
career and, as it were, draw up an initial appraisal. For just over
twenty years, his work had been built up of mainly circumstantial
pieces, with articles, conference papers, and seminars. His books,
with the exception of Glas, were collections in which the overall
argument was revealed only in a pointillist fashion. But by now,
in the United States – where more and more of his work was being
translated – Derrida was being taught, and overviews of his work
were being published. In 1983, Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction
came out: its avowed aim was ‘to describe and evaluate the prac-
tice of deconstruction in literary studies’, but also to analyse it ‘as
a philosophical strategy’.^12 Just as Gayatri Spivak had attempted
to do, Culler wished to grasp Derrida’s thought as a whole and
make it usable. This transformation of a challenging body of work
- extremely disseminated as it was, and almost inseparable from
the texts on which it commented – into a kind of universal method
would create several misunderstandings which Derrida laboured
tirelessly to combat.
The three papers on Paul de Man were not a matter of commemo-
ration alone. They were also polemical. For two years, articles
against de Man, Derrida, and the Yale School had been growing
ever more frequent in the press. The confrontations, initially con-
fi ned to academia, spread to a more general readership. The titles
of these articles summed up the general reaction: ‘The crisis in
English studies’, ‘The word turned upside down’, ‘Destroying
literary studies’. As Derrida wrote:
Certain professors invested with a great deal of prestige,
and thus also with a great deal of academic power, launch a
campaign against what seems to them to threaten the very