ABSTRACT
The topic is indeed “Derrida’s America,” not “Derrida’s Algeria,” “Derrida’s France,” or “Derrida’s Europe,” and it is being addressed by someone who not only resides in America but is American born and bred. Yet another example, it might be thought, of American hegemony, of America extending its empire over things not just military, political, economic, and cultural but academic and intellectual, right down to the reception, interpretation, dissemination, and, now, the legacy of Jacques Derrida. Unless, of course, it is simply an acknowledgment that, as Derrida himself once put it, “no theoretical work, no literary work, no philosophical work, can receive a worldwide legitimation without crossing the [United] States, without being first legitimized in the States,”1 an acknowledgement that while Derrida lived the first eighteen years of his life in colonial Algeria, while he attended university in France and subsequently taught for over forty years in Paris, it was really only in America, or only through his success in America, that Jacques Derrida, professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieur and Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, came to be known, indeed renowned, throughout the world, as “Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction.”
