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 of Friendship,” about which the American Philosophical Association was recently reminded by Jacques Derrida, points in the direction of such a new sense of what politics might be, and might become, against the grain of what it has not ceased to be instead.2 A sense to be recovered of a politics to come, to be approached.
There is, however, no happy success story to be told about deconstruction in America, and there is no salvation history to be related, as one would wish for, and fall for, in a country dedicated to success and salvation. On the contrary, one has to admit from the start that “nothing fails like success” in deconstruction, as Barbara Johnson put it when she saw the need to use history differently and decided “to use history deconstructively,” in order to avoid the false success of “answers, causes, explanations, or origins.”3 In order, that is, not to lose track of the problems, questions, and impasses. Among them, though not most urgently, the issues of self-interpretation and self-implication had to be taken into account, those auto-interpretive figures of self-deconstruction that make it difficult to tell the story of deconstruction in America in the form of a metahistory of bygone possibilities, remaining resistances, or persisting side effects.
When Derrida delivered the 1985 Wellek Library Lectures at Irvine, he discarded the title of Deconstruction in America in favor of Memoires for Paul de Man, who had died in December 1983, ten years ago now, and whose memory is implied in this conference, as the topic of this conference was already contained and explained in Derrida’s dedication of 1985. “Geopolitics does not suffice,” said Derrida at the time, but he was ready to “risk,” as he added (“with a smile”), “the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction—l’Amérique, mais c’est la deconstruction.”4 The image discarded—America as geopolitical enterprise—does not disqualify the “toponymy” of America for deconstruction, that is, America as deconstruction’s hypothetical “residence” at a specific moment, a moment whose historicality might be most appropriately captured by calling it in deconstruction. Deconstruction may be America to the extent that America is in deconstruction.
Beside the many good reasons why one could think so, it is important to note that it could be otherwise. Deconstruction could be everywhere, and is everywhere, but the fact that America happens to be an exemplary place for deconstruction is not a coincidence, the coincidence, say, of America’s nostalgia for the appeal of French thought. Deconstruction could not be turned into some generalizable humanism that would feed into America’s concern for Western values. It would not exist everywhere in the same way, as McDonald’s and Coca Cola do, the simulacra of America’s being worldwide. On the contrary, deconstruction should be expected to exist in different places in very different ways. No, what keeps it in America rather than elsewhere, say Europe, and gives it a specific American place value is a sense of difference in America that is different from Europe—although one could also say that it is Europe’s sense of difference, but in a very different way. And it is the additional difference, the differentiating momentum within that difference, that comes to count (as in any difference), and is to be investigated, through deconstruction.
Deconstruction in America, one could speculate, takes advantage of the difference America makes with respect to Europe; and pragmatism is the American name for this difference in the realm of philosophy, a difference which seems indifferent to what it has left behind, and keeps leaving behind, in This New—I quote from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Emerson—Yet Unapproachable America.5 Yet the hope against lost hopes, the loss of European hopes, to be precise, cannot be theory-hope again, according to older and newer pragmatists alike. Their declared indifference to philosophy and “theory as such” is no longer to be consoled by theory-hope.6 They remain inconsolable to the point of abandoning pragmatism itself—thus hoping to bring it back to where it began, to the vision of the new, yet still unapproachable America. Back to the old pragmatism’s vision of “making our future different from our past,” as Richard Rorty keeps underlining the difference in question, in the name of solidarity instead of objectivity, democracy instead of philosophy, or fairness as justice.7
It is here that pragmatism meets deconstruction, although for reasons other than neopragmatists seem able to see. It is not deconstruction’s antiessentialist, antifoundationalist side effect, let alone a new “kind of writing” that would account for this meeting.8 Rather, it seems to be pragmatism’s insistence on the impossible difference traditional philosophy kept promising without ever being able to deliver; to go, for example, for fairness, while justice may seem as yet, and maybe forever, unapproachable. The crucial place of A Theory of Justice for any pragmatist attempt toward making a difference, is also deconstruction’s topos for investigating the force of law and maintaining the difference in which legal regulations fall short with respect to the justice approached.9 Justice may be nothing but the name for this difference between legal practice and the law’s force, which both carries on this practice and, in carrying it out, transgresses what is carried out with respect to the justice to be done. Likewise fairness may be the best possible name for this imperative to transgress, rather than toward prosecution, enforcement, and execution. Justice may be, and may have to remain forever, out of reach, but nonetheless approachable—if and only insofar as fairness is, indeed, applied. How, if not pragmatically, with respect to a given situation, and given the time, can justice be assessed? No instance is better suited to exemplify the paradoxes of pragmatism than justice in America.
But more than just this remains to be said for the exemplary role of justice in the American “drama of consent.”10 After the first and, so to speak, primal difference that America had promised to accomplish with respect to the difference that Europe was unable to make—and European philosophy was unable to ensure—America had to take
