The discovery of America

the reception of Derrida in the United States

pp. 28-63

in: Mark Currie, The invention of deconstruction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

It is often said that the charisma of a charismatic leader is not located in the personality of the leader but conferred upon the individual by the needs and desires of those who follow. A simple version of the logic of supplementarity is at work in such an argument: the thing that follows produces the thing that it is supposed to follow from. This is a useful way of thinking about the invention of deconstruction, and more specifically, about the way that the reception of Derrida produced an account of Derrida that was only loosely related to what he had actually written, and reflected instead the complex needs and desires of the academy. This chapter focuses on just how complex those needs and desires were in literary studies in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s, and on the very confusing historical circumstances in which Derrida was produced, mediated, translated and transformed by his reception.