Rethinking Deconstruction in America
Rethinking Deconstruction in America

Summary/Abstract: This paper seeks to rethink this narrative of deconstruction in America. The essay is organized into three sections: (1) The first investigates academic debates on deconstruction in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Participants in these debates charged Derrida and de Man with being anti-historical. Repeated outside the academy in the popular press, this accusation conflated Derrida’s and de Man’s work and obscured their philosophies of history. (2) The second section examines the central, yet overlooked, role history played in Derrida’s and de Man’s work. A close inspection also reveals that de Man did not merely deviate from Derrida but in fact opposed his philosophy of history. (3) The third section focuses on the media war of the 1987 de Man Affair to demonstrate how the claim that deconstruction, specifically de Man, was anti-historical reached non-academic audiences. Ultimately, this discussion concealed the centrality of history in Derrida’s and de Man’s work and deeply shaped the reception of deconstruction in the United States.

• Details
• Contents