Each spring until the last, for nearly 20 years, Jacques Derrida left Paris to lecture at UC Irvine.
The Orange County planned community couldn't help but seem an unlikely home for a radical French intellectual. And yet, as a graduate student at UC Irvine, I always thought Derrida's presence there made a kind of sense. The epicenter of the Orange County housing boom, Irvine is constantly being destroyed and re-created. Again and again, familiar sites are bulldozed and replaced by buildings so sparkling new they appear never to have suffered the indignity of being built. This perpetual making and unmaking is what is meant by "deconstruction." Or is it? Alas, we will never know for certain. Derrida died still refusing to define the word -- movement, method, theory, process? -- with which his name was synonymous.
For Derrida's followers, "deconstruction" was like a code word in reverse. Only his critics spoke it aloud. I was at Irvine in the early '90s, when, as his recent obituaries have taken pains to point out, Derrida's influence was on the wane. Poststructuralism no longer in vogue, university literature departments were in thrall to more overtly political movements like Cultural Studies and the New Historicism. Not long before, it was revealed that Derrida's late friend and advocate, Paul de Man, had written for a collaborationist publication during World War II -- a fact upon which Derrida's adversaries seized to make a tenuous but widely embraced connection between deconstruction and fascism. Irvine was deconstruction's last stand. The proud but beleaguered Derrida was like an aging Napoleon in exile; he seemed to be biding time in Irvine, plotting his return to power with his faithful but shrinking retinue.
Nonetheless, the California sunshine suited the Algerian-born Jew. Tan, white-haired and well dressed, Derrida was known at UCI for being fond of the beach -- and of beautiful women. His reputation may have diminished during his tenure at Irvine, but he became increasingly famous until he achieved the ultimate California dream and became, literally, a movie star. Instead of his countless books, it was the documentary "Derrida" that would serve for many as an introduction to the man who had spent so much of his career defending the priority of text over image. That is, the theoretical priority.
My dinner with Jacques
