In the fall of 1993, the Poetics Institute and the Center for French Civilization at New York University took advantage of Jacques Derrida’s presence in New York for a conference on the present state of deconstruction in America—as evidenced, at least in part, by the yearly event of Derrida’s seminar at the Poetics Institute on The Politics and the Poetics of the Secret. Special thanks are due to Thomas Bishop, the chairman of the French Department of New York University, for organizing the conference from which the contributions for this volume derive or take their departure. He, together with the Center for French Civilization and the Florence Gould Foundation, made the event possible. The French and English Departments shared the work of presenting the conference, but special recognition is due to Carol Downey for her role in managing the important details. To Peggy Kamuf goes particular gratitude for her timely translation of Derrida’s contribution to this volume. Thanks also go to Anthony Reynolds for his help in completing the manuscript, and to Jane B. Malmo for her dedicated editorial work.
Contributors
Derek Attridge is the author of Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988) and The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982) and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (1992). He is a Professor in the English Department of Rutgers University.
Michel Beaujour is Professor of French at New York University and the author of Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait (1991), translated from the French Mirroirs d’encre (1980).
Judith Butler is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. Her books include Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993).
Cynthia Chase is Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of Decomposing Figures (1985) and the editor of Romanticism (1993).
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His books include On Deconstruction (1982), Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1985), and Framing the Sign (1988).
Jacques Derrida is Jacques Derrida.
Peter Eisenman is the Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Achitecture at Cooper Union and principle of Eisenman Architects of New York.
Rodolphe Gasché is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the author of The Tain of the Mirror (1986).
Anselm Haverkamp is Professor of English and Director of the Poetics Institute at New York University. He has recently written Laub voll Trauer (1991) and has edited Gedächtniskunst and Memoria (with Renate Lachmann, 1991, 1992) and Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit: Derrida—Benjamin (1993).
Peggy Kamuf is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her publications include Fictions of Feminine Desire (1982) and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988). She edited the recent collection A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991) and has translated numerous works by Jacques Derrida, including Specters of Marx (1994).
Perry Meisel is Professor of English at New York University and the author of The Myth of the Modern (1987).
J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine and the author of many books, including The Ethics of Reading (1987) and Visions of Pygmalion (1990).
Avital Ronell is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Her books include Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986), The Telephone Book (1991) and Crack Wars (1992).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has translated Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1977), edited Selected Subaltern Studies (1991) with Ranajit Guha, and authored In Other Worlds (1989) and Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).
Barbara Vinken has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of French and the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. She now teaches at the University of Hannover, Germany. She is the author of Unentrinnbare Neugierde (1991), Dekonstrucktiver Feminismus (Ed., 1992) and Mode nach de Mode (1993).
Elisabeth Weber is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her book on Emmanuel Levinas, Verfolgung und Trauma (1989), is to appear in English under the title Persecution and Trauma: On Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence.
Samuel Weber is Professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. Following the publication of Institution and Interpretation, (1985), his earlier books, Rückkehr zu Freud (1978) and Freud-Legende (1979) appeared in English as Return to Freud (1991) and The Legend of Freud (1987).
David Wills is Professor of French at Louisiana State University. His publications include Writing Pynchon (with Alec McHoul, 1982), Screen/play: Derrida and Film Theory (with Peter Brunette, 1989), and the forthcoming Prothesis.
Deconstruction is/as Neopragmatism?: Preliminary Remarks on Deconstruction in America
Anselm Haverkamp
The first part of the following is a revised version of the author’s opening remarks to the conference Deconstruction is /in America in the fall of 1993, which appears in this volume in a rearranged and supplemented form. The second part underlines some of the political implications of the conference after the event. The sketchy character is deliberate, since the intention of the conference was not to arrive at a new narrative on the subject of deconstruction but to offer a highly selective approach to certain problems. That other problems are missing or remain underrepresented is a part of the problem to being with.
The reasons for looking back on Deconstruction in America are obvious enough. Looking back, certainly, is not the same as giving up, and in spite of the notorious task of facing the future in, and of, say, future deconstructions, the possibilities of such a facing ask for a review, an account of the future that has passed, the future left behind in the years of deconstruction in America. As the slogan “Deconstruction is America” suggests, that the fate of deconstruction in America is as hard to determine as the project of America. A conference that would reconsider the role of deconstruction in America over the last two decades would have to take into account the particular role of America for deconstruction: not only for the development of deconstruction’s philosophical and critical arguments, but for its political adaptation to, and involvement with what was left in American universities after the academic dispute of the Sixties and Seventies—that came under the heading of “The Structuralist Controversy”—had run its course.1
Looking back on the seminal Johns Hopkins conference of that title some 25 years ago, we realize that this controversy closed an age-old debate on the limits of man and humanist principles of education rather than opening a new one—however manifest and visible the outline of the new may already have been at the time. The beginnings of deconstruction in America had to remain for a quarter of a century associated with bringing to an end an educational era whose aftermath had to be faced, while deconstruction’s own—and one is tempted to add, its substantial—contribution was to surface much more quietly. “A new sense of the political” seems the most persuasive name for this quiet advent whose agenda has never been destruction, nor resurrection, but a pursuit of happiness. “The Politics