Remembering Jacques Derrida at the Holiday Inn

I did see Derrida. It was at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco. It was early 1988, a cold morning. I went with my buddy Matt. Before the conference began -- it was a big convention space, the American Philosophical Association was the sponsoring organization -- I was able to size up the great man in close proximity in the hallway outside. He was smallish in stature and well groomed and tailored, not in a foppish or dandy way, but in a formidable manner. He warmly greeted old lady Majorie Grene, a UC Davis professor who had written an early influential book in the U.S. on Existentialism, Introduction to Existentialism (1959), a copy of which I had at Berkeley and I think I have here somewhere.

Derrida was on a panel that morning in the big hall with a very nervous Rodolphe Gasche who almost melted down while speaking. Derrida was extremely kind to him up there in front of all the hostile American philosophers.

Derrida took the podium after Gasche, who had written a pro-Derrida book published in 1986, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, and in passing the red-faced Gasche who was on his way back to his seat at the table on the dais Derrida clasped him around the shoulders in a totally selfless act of benevolence. I always remembered that. That and Derrida's hostile reception from the majority of the audience who were obviously tenured old professors.

During the question and answer period (Matt took a crack with one about the etymology of genuflection and genius -- moving the seed up to the brain) Derrida responded to a hostile inquiry with what I thought was an incredible revelation for a professional philosopher and intellectual -- "More and more I cannot tell the difference between having read and not having read." Or something along those lines.

My project in my lost honors thesis was to place Derrida as a Kantian; that the Kantian nature of Deconstruction could be understood by looking at -- of all people -- the founder of analytic philosphy, Gottlob Frege. With this argument I would then bridge the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. My end point was to arrive at a new pedagogy, one Derrida points the way to in Of Grammatology (1967), but one that was more explicitly informed by Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his moral philosophy. Ambitious. Turned out to be too ambitious.