Notes 1 After the Event: Looking Back on Deconstruction 1. The question of immediate retrospect has figured in many commentaries on this event, but often focused on the supposedly inaugural nature of the con- ference for structuralism in America, organized as it was to celebrate the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. Russell Daylight claims that the ‘force of Derrida’s 1966 paper was such that it simultaneously announced the opening and closing of structuralism in the Anglophone world’ (Daylight 2012). The simultaneity of the beginning and the end was extended to deconstruction itself partly by the length of time that it took for Derrida’s paper to be made widely available in the United States. For further detail see Chapter 2 below. 2. In ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ this is a concern with an emerging monstrosity that cannot yet be fully discerned. We see this also in the mention of the future anterior at the opening of Of Grammatology. The epoch more generally has been characterized this way by François Lyotard and Julia Kristeva: see Lyotard (1978); Kristeva (1981). 3. The wording is borrowed here from Thomas Pavel and David Herman, and the phrase is widely used in cognitive narratology to describe one of the ten- dencies of the structuralist phase that ‘postclassical’ narratology has had to move beyond. 4. Psyche: Invention of the Other and ‘Typewriter Ribbon’. 5. Derrida refers to a wide debate on this subject, and in particular to essays by Suzanne Gearhart and Rodolphe Gasché. These discussions figure later in this book. It is worth speculating, though, that the notion of self-reflexivity may simply have been mistaken for the notion of self-reflection, which makes perfectly good sense. The existence of a debate about self-reflexivity corroborates the suggestion that subject–object relations were at the cen- tre of deconstruction’s reception in the United States, and the emphasis very often offends Derrida’s most sensitive commentators. See for exam- ple Attridge: ‘We certainly don’t want to replay those arguments of the 1970s about literature as self-deconstruction (or, even more reductively, litera- ture as self-deconstruction understood as simple self-reflexivity) ...’ (Attridge 2011, 156). 6. The full rubric of the original conference is cited by Martin McQuillan as ‘Culture and Materiality: a post millenarian conference – a propos of de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology – to consider trajectories for “materialist” thought in the afterlife of theory, cultural studies and Marxist critique’ (McQuillan 2012, 89). McQuillan offers a fascinating reading of the relationship between Derrida and de Man that emerges from that essay and from the concepts of ‘excuse’ and ‘pardon’ in Derrida, de Man and Rousseau (2012, 85–102). 218 Notes 219 2 The Discovery of America: The Reception of Derrida in the United States 1. Kuhn, T. A Theory of Scientific Revolutions, International Encyclopedia of Uni- fied Science vol. 2, No. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Kuhn states that transition between paradigms is characterized by a period of com- petition for the status of the new paradigm. A fuller discussion can be found in Chapter 3. 2. Opposition to New Criticism from Chicago Aristotelians such as R.S. Crane, Norman Maclean and Elder Olson is not strictly, or always in the name of history. Crane had been a convert from literary history in 1935 but retreated from the association with the New Critics. Wellek cites them principally as evidence that New Criticism was never unopposed, but their opposition was as a rival formalism. 3. The sources of chapters published as L’ecriture et la difference are listed in Writ- ing and Difference trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 341. ‘Ellipsis’ was the only previously unpublished section. 4. Delivered on 21 October 1966 at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, Johns Hopkins University. 5. Derrida, J. ‘The Ends of Man’, delivered as a paper at the International Collo- quium of Philosophy in 1968, published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, 1969. 6. Lentricchia After the New Criticism p. 159: ‘In the space of five or six years, Derrida had arrived; had attracted some extraordinarily commit- ted and gifted students on both coasts; had spawned two new journals Diacritics and Glyph ...’ Culler’s is a better analysis in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History ed. Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 7. Hubert is presumably referring to ‘New Criticism et Nouvelle Critique’ Preuves October 1966, published as Chapter 2 of Blindness and Insight under the title ‘Form and Intent in American New Criticism’. 8. Miller, J. Hillis ‘The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth’ New Literary His- tory, Winter 1971, Miller refers to ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ in the footnotes of this essay. 9. See for example the closing paragraphs of Biasin’s ‘Rhetorical Questions’ Diacritics, Fall 1971 and Fletcher’s curious description of the Yale-School-to- be as a group of historical critics in the same issue. 10. The internal quote comes from ‘The Ends of Man’ which appeared in translation in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 September 1969. Otherwise Gelley is the translator of citations from Derrida. 11. Gelley cautions that ‘Derrida would not necessarily subscribe to this sort of historical analysis’ before claiming that Derrida shares Foucault’s analysis of the history of interpretation, quoting from The Order of Things p. 41. The problems of the alignment of Derrida and Foucault are discussed below. 12. ‘Within the enclosure, by means of indirect and always perilous manoeu- vres, risking constantly a relapse back into what one intends to deconstruct, ourtaskis...to indicate in a rigorous manner their adherence to the mech- anism which they themselves enable us to deconstruct’ (my italics). From De la grammatologie p. 25, quoted by Gelley ‘Form as Force’ p. 10. 220 Notes 13. The term ‘deconstruction’ is notably absent from de Man’s work as a whole. The purpose of this comparison is to contrast the only two major articles to discuss Derrida’s work up to this point. For a discussion of de Man’s use of the term, see Gasché’s ‘Deconstruction as Criticism’, where he claims that de Man’s work is at its furthest point from Derrida’s when he uses the term ‘deconstruction’, an analysis with which de Man agreed in a radio interview published in The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). 14. It is also possible that ‘deconstruction’ had a special resonance for a histor- ically minded readership through its accidental reference to the historical notion of ‘reconstruction’ of the past, so that ‘deconstruction’ might be understood as an antonym for ‘reconstruction’. 15. Fletcher’s review of de Man’s Blindness and Insight, ‘The Perpetual Error’ (Diacritics 1972, p.14), states that ‘Derrida has already advanced beyond (Grammatologie) in his efforts at a “deconstruction” of certain lines of Western philosophical tradition.’ 16. For a discussion of the origins of the term ‘deconstruction’ in Europe, and an American use of the term as a ‘translation supplement that is absolutely called for by something that must have been lacking in the original’, see Derrida ‘Deconstruction in America’ Critical Exchange 17, 1985, 22–23. For a discussion of its origins in Derrida and the French language see Peeters 2013, 159–161. 17. See for example Mary Ann Caws ‘Tel Quel: Text and Revolution’ Diacritics, Spring 1973; Derrida ‘Positions’ pt. 2 Diacritics, Fall 1973; de Man ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’ Diacritics, Fall 1973; Girard ‘Levi-Strauss’, Frye, Derrida and Shakespeare Diacritics, Fall 1973; and Cohn ‘Nodes’ Diacritics Summer 1974. 18. The claim is based on ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ in Blindness and Insight first published in Daedalus 1970; and ‘Lyric and Modernity’ first published in Forms of Lyric 1970. 19. First delivered as a paper at the Diacritics symposium ‘Texts, Pretexts, Contexts’ in April 1973. 20. Culler’s discussion of Derrida seems to resist the idea that he is the avant- garde of structuralism. He wishes instead to exclude him from serious structuralism, as signified by the inverted commas in his chapter heading ‘ “Beyond” Structuralism: Tel Quel’. 21. A colloquium held in New York in 1976, papers of which were published in Critical Inquiry, Spring 1976, under the title ‘The Limits of Pluralism’ includ- ing Booth ‘Preserving the Exemplar: or How not to Dig our own Graves’, Abrams ‘The Deconstructive Angel’ and Miller ‘The Critic as Host’. 22. Jameson claims on one hand that White’s Metahistory is the most important work in the field of the philosophy of history since Collingwood, and on the other that it is incomplete as a historiographical model. The implication of this latter criticism is that White’s work stands or falls on its ability to reinstate a historiographical model such that the writing of history remains possible. This position is commensurate with Jameson’s own defence of history in the 1970s. See Jameson ‘Figural Relativism’ Diacritics, Spring 1976. 23. See Miller ‘Beginning with a Text’; White ‘Criticism as Cultural Politics’; Riddel ‘Scriptive Fate/Scriptive Hope’; Donato ‘Here Now/Always Already: Notes 221 Incidental Remarks on some Recent Characterizations of the Text’ all in Diacritics, Fall 1976. 24. Riddel is presumably referring here to the much cited comment in ‘Differance’: ‘If history did not carry within it the final repression of dif- ference ...’, rather than the analysis presented in ‘Positions’, which is more ambiguous. 25. Derrida ‘Signature, Event, Context’ Glyph 1; Searle ‘Reiterating the Differ- ences: a Reply to Derrida’ Glyph 2; Derrida ‘Limited Inc’ Glyph 2. 26. Altieri raised questions of language theory in ‘Wittgenstein on Conscious- ness and Language’ Modern Language Notes 1976, the argument of which did not reach a large readership until its publication in Critical Inquiry in 1979.