cheers.

As for a school of deconstruction, people have attempted to group together Derrida with Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom as the “Yale Critics”, largely because Derrida taught at Yale owing to his close relationship with de Man and in turn drew considerable interest from the aforementioned members of the Yale faculty. When Louis Menand was writing on “The Politics of Deconstruction” for The New York Review of Books, he noted that all of the above (with the exception of Bloom) were considered to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of deconstruction in 1987, when de Man’s writings for Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land appeared, yet could not seem to agree on how to interpret de Man’s work from that time or its significance for his later work. Whatever the merits of Menand’s article, it didn’t occur to him that deconstruction, such as it could be referred to in the singular even in the context of work by people who had spent a reasonably long time reading and discussing their work, might never have set out to be such a narrow path that agreement would be possible about the specifics of concern to Menand in respect to such a difficult question that was bound to have very individual implications.

One might just as breezily speak of a French “school” of deconstruction, whose avowed members included Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. When the former three felt compelled to publish books (two in Derrida’s case) on Heidegger, Nazism, and the Shoah when the issue hit the media in 1987, it became abundantly clear that Lyotard wasn’t inclined to agree with Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, whose works were distinct from one another but did not seem to square off either.

Even when the stakes didn’t look so high and the occassion less urgent, one can reasonably judge from de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Blindness”, Derrida’s “Writing Proofs”, and Lyotard’s “Translator’s Notes” that there is no single identity that could subsume the work of all. I would hesitate at any analysis that assumed that deconstruction was nothing more than what they fully shared. These people were always friends to Derrida, and Derrida always insisted that an essential aspect friendship was that something of a friend remain forever strange and obscure, even to the most intimate friendships sealed by the sharing of secrets, personal or otherwise.

Derrida said elsewhere that he was rather dissatisfied to have spoken of deconstruction so much in the plural, and Lyotard certainly made an effort to distinguish different deconstructions by referring to Derridean deconstruction, Heideggerean deconstruction and so forth. Deconstruction always being something of an event and therefore impossible to define exhaustively, one cannot get away from speaking of it with terms like trait, signature, and counter-signature.