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
I first met Derrida not in Irvine but in Paris. It was the summer after my sophomore year at Yale -- where, like so many Yale undergraduates, I had fallen prey to the seductions of poststructuralist theory.
At the time, I was dating someone who made it a point to cultivate the friendship of famous intellectuals. Thus I found myself being chauffeured by Derrida from Paris to his home in Ris-Orangis, a place not unlike Irvine as Paris suburbs go. The house felt surprisingly familiar; it could have been the home of any American academic. The meal prepared by Derrida's wife, Marguerite, a psychoanalyst, even included a caprese salad and tabbouleh, two dishes then de rigueur in this country for a certain cultural class.
Among the other guests were several visiting literature professors, one of whom was freshly arrived from a conference on D.H. Lawrence, and dinner soon devolved into a debate about the relative merits of Lawrence, that English exponent of free love, and Jean Genet, the French exponent of prisoner love. It was heady conversation, not to mention company, for a 19-year-old who could barely speak French, but I was determined to contribute.
I knew that Genet was a particular subject of Derrida's, and I sensed I might win points by disparaging Lawrence. I was right. Flushed with success, I remained silent for the rest of the evening.
After I graduated from Yale, I followed what was by then a well-trod path from New Haven to Irvine. But when I enrolled in Derrida's seminar, I didn't let on that I had met him before. I was afraid that he wouldn't recognize me. Or worse, that he would speak to me in French. It wasn't difficult to keep my distance; his seminars were crowded, his lectures attended by hundreds. Hearing Derrida lecture was not dissimilar to reading one of his essays -- at once stupefying, exhilarating and numbingly repetitive.
Almost always he began with a metaphor that for some reason intrigued him, usually one that recurs in works by multiple authors (the beast or "leviathan" in political philosophy, for instance), and then poked and prodded the metaphor, teasing it until it revealed its secret, or rather until it revealed its secretiveness, its "unknowability," in Derridian terms, its resistance to the tyrannical rule of the concept. At times, I felt that Derrida was a machine: Drop a metaphor in the slot and watch it go through the same series of motions over and over until it tumbles out the other end, now turned inside out, everything and nothing revealed.
