Under this title, ‘Jacques Derrida in America’, which was assigned to me (or perhaps thrown down like a challenge) by Mustapha Chérif, whom I should like to thank here for his generous invitation, in the name of the National Library of Algeria, to this important and precious event (the more so in that I am – if I can say this – not even American, but English, from England, somewhat exiled, it is true, in the USA) – under this title, then, I could for example have offered you a little historical survey of Jacques Derrida’s trips to the United States of America.1 Starting with the first (and by far the longest) trip, by boat, in 1956–7, on the more of less serious pretext (‘a bit fictitious’, he told me himself2) of consulting some Husserl archives the microfilmed copy of which had just become available at Harvard. (A trip during which, far from home and family – and not by chance – he married Marguerite Aucouturier, here present . . . ). This type of historical survey might go on to enumerate the very many trips that Jacques Derrida made to the USA during a period of fifty years, his very numerous lectures, but perhaps above all the periods of teaching (his teaching posts) first at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), no doubt in part a result of his contribution to the famous conference on the Human Sciences in 1966 (to which he gave ‘Structure, Sign and Play . . . ’ which first made him known in English translation), then his twelve consecutive years of regular visits of several weeks a year to Yale (1975–86, the years of the so-called ‘Yale School’), before going to the University of Irvine in California every year from 1987 to the end, not to mention his many visits to New York and to many other great American universities, most often, especially at first, in literature or comparative literature departments, even though one can also subsequently follow the impact of his thought in schools and departments of law, architecture, geography and even sometimes philosophy.
(If one were trying to do a more detailed history of these movements, one would also have to bring out another, slower, movement, with respect to language, and especially the English language: for if at the beginning Derrida’s teaching always took place in French, under the aegis of French departments, he grew increasingly comfortable with English (at least in its American version, for I know – and I really do know – that he sometimes had trouble with British English), so that, even though as far as I know he never really wrote any texts in English, he nevertheless had a very refined relation with that language which he used with a definite facility and elegance, just as he on occasion wrote texts in French with a view to their English or American translation, already intervening in the translation to come, giving instructions or throwing out explicit challenges to the translator, etc.)
Presented in this way, the chapter ‘Derrida in America’ would form part of the ‘Derrida Abroad’ volume of his history or biography. A chapter that would of course be longer than others, because one can say without fear of contradiction that the USA was, both really and symbolically, the very figure of the ‘foreign’, a very familiar foreign, in Jacques Derrida’s intellectual life.
Rather than attempting to be the historian of these many journeys, however, in the time that is given to me here, I should like to draw your attention to a motif that is both vaster and more restricted, having to do with translation in all senses of the term. And what I have to say about this could no doubt be organised around the following sentence, obviously unpronounceable [and untranslatable] as such, to be read in all possible senses: ‘Jacques Derrida got translated in(to) America(n), and (it) (never) came home (to him) again’ [Jaques Derrida s’est fait traduire aux Etats-Unis, et il (n’)en est (pas) revenu].
1. First, literally, so to speak, in the sense that Jacques Derrida got translated in the USA. More, earlier, and obviously with a broader distribution and impact that anywhere else. And when I say anywhere else, I mean anywhere else, even France. It would perhaps be worth pondering the fact that, quantitatively at least, Derrida will have been (and plausibly always will be) much more read in English than in any other language, including French. (This is already not simple, for one can also reasonably imagine that a non-negligible part of what Derrida does is done in a certain relation to the untranslatable and the idiomatic: if you’ll allow me a personal confession here, and even as one of Derrida’s translators, I have the greatest difficulty reading him in English, at the very moment I’m trying to make him readable for Anglophones, just as, on the personal level, my friendship with Jacques took place exclusively in French . . . ) For one of the paradoxes that must be taken into account when thinking about this whole history of Jacques Derrida in America is that he was not merely a great-French-thinker who, on the basis of a certain national standing, got translated into other languages, and first among them English or American, but that Jacques Derrida himself comes back, comes back to France and has his home there as a ‘Great French Thinker’ from an America that without ever having been an adoptive home for him (he lived there, of course, and lived there quite a bit, but unlike some other French thinkers he never settled there full-time, and after that first long trip never spent more than a few weeks there at a time), an America that is nonetheless the country (and the language) from which he returns to become (at least in terms of recognition, and not merely media recognition) the great thinker he will have been, ‘the greatest philosopher in the world’, as I heard him presented by Franz-Olivier Giesbert at the beginning of a TV show broadcast not long before his death,3 a thinker become himself, become Jacques Derrida himself, even in his most intimate relations with the French language and culture, on returning from the USA, returning then from English, in a spectral relationship he also helps us to think through.4
This complex relation is part (but not any old part, and no doubt in fact the essential or at least exemplary part) of a movement that can be called, that is often called, ‘French Thought’, French Theory as the French themselves sometimes call it, in English, a little naively astonished to see this image of themselves come back to them from elsewhere, from the USA.
Jacques Derrida himself says something about this in La contre-allée, in a little narrative of the history of his relations with the USA that he produced for Catherine Malabou:
. . . Allied landing in November 1942, no doubt the first astonished encounter with foreigners who came from afar. An other culture. Discovery of America. Before I went to America, America invaded my ‘home’. By the way, I do not know if or how you are going to tackle my ‘American question’. Of course there is more than one question (first big trip, first long stay abroad, 1956–7, so many universities in which I have taught, so many translations, so many friends and enemies, etc., and I’ve written a lot, though very unsatisfactorily, about this. But if I were to treat said ‘American question’ in your place, I would first be tempted by the genre of satire. I have always found deeply comical what is said about this ‘American connection’, especially in France. There’s a lot of incompetence, ignorance or naivety in it, of course, which is not of itself funny, but the posing and the tone make you laugh. The provincial genre (‘that little lad of ours is very well-known abroad, you know, you wouldn’t believe it, especially over there in America’) is nonetheless peremptory, arrogant and anti-American, xenophobic, even, pouting (‘it’s OK especially for the Americans, but we’re not taken in’, implying, with sigh and grimace, ‘Ah, if only he would stay over there’). The same people pretend not to know (for, to talk like them, they are not without knowing) that although I only spend a few weeks a year in the United States, teaching regularly and very full-time in Paris, I am anything but indulgent towards a whole ‘American culture’ . . . .5
2. But there is another relation, perhaps more ‘internal’ to Derrida’s thought, that is in play in ‘Jacques Derrida in America’. For Derrida, no doubt in the general optic of a sort of ‘definition’ of deconstruction as ‘what happens’, also said one day (even if only to go on to complicate and even take back this sentence that sounds like a provocation): ‘but America is deconstruction’ (Mémoires pour Paul de Man). And even if, in what follows this surprising assertion, Derrida goes on to refuse it and even deny it (saying ‘In the war raging on the subject of deconstruction, there are no fronts, but if there were, they would all pass through the United States, they would define the lot and the very partition of America. But we have learnt, from “Deconstruction”, to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names . . . No, deconstruction is not a proper name, and America is not its proper name. Let us say, rather: two open sets that partially intersect in an allegorico-metonymic figure. And in this fiction of truth, America would be the title for a new novel for the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history’ [p. 18]) – so even if he goes on to refuse or even deny this identification, it is henceforth not out of the question to take up this sentence (‘America is deconstruction’) and repeat it (Derrida does so himself, for example during the TV programme with Giesbert that I have already mentioned, as an at least partial truth.) If America is not, or not simply, the proper name of deconstruction, this is also because deconstruction does not have a proper name (not even ‘deconstruction’), and ‘America’ will then remain, along with a few others, a possible nickname for it. (On the other hand one can imagine that Derrida would no doubt never, but never ever have said: ‘France is deconstruction’.)
3. Even if nothing is simple in this story, then (but nothing is or ever was simple, and we must, with Derrida, tirelessly affirm this non-simplicity and draw from it the very resources of thought), I would like to conclude these short remarks by insisting on what I believe to be the unprecedented status of what is at stake in this syntagma ‘Derrida in America’. Not only because Derrida was exemplarily prudent in what he said of the USA, as opposed to many other French intellectuals who have rushed to pronounce on the subject, in a gesture analysed in Specters of Marx. But because there has been, and for the moment there is, no other ‘philosopher’ who could serve as an example of this configuration of foreignness and translation that is, I believe, quite unique. There too, Derrida will have been unique. He will have been without the slightest doubt the philosopher who travelled the most, throughout the whole world (since the dawn of time no one else ‘went abroad’ as much, as though this were another aspect of so-called ‘globalisation’), and it is the relation with the USA that organises and focuses these journeys, as I have said. So if one would not understand Derrida without taking account of his roots, so tangled and leaving such a mark on him, one would also miss something essential if one did not take seriously Derrida in translation, in displacement, and notably in America. ‘Derrida in America’ is a new sociopolitico-professional figure that we shall no doubt have to meditate for a long time to come. And as we can imagine that the new technologies of the virtual (of which indeed Derrida had a certain experience), still in their infancy today, will tend in the years to come to replace so-called ‘real’ journeys, then we can wager that this figure, summed up here in this laconic formula ‘Derrida in America’, will perhaps remain without precedent in the history of thought, a unique case, a unique journey of which I will always be so proud and delighted to have been lucky enough to follow some stages and share some way-stations.
1. This short paper was written in French and delivered to the conference ‘Sur les traces de Jacques Derrida’, Bibliothèque Nationale d’Algérie, Algiers, 25 November 2006, the first ever conference devoted to Derrida in Algeria.
2. Cf. G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), p. 303.
3. ‘Culture et dépendances’, France 3, June 2004. It is true that during the same broadcast Giesbert also described Derrida as ‘the new Bourdieu’, which leaves one thinking . . .
4. Especially in Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993).
5. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, La contre-allée (Paris: La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1999), pp. 33–5.