Invited to reflect on the topos of ‘deconstruction in America’ in a 1997 conference intervention in New York, Jacques Derrida commented that the period stipulated for consideration, of the preceding twenty years, needed to be questioned and extended back further. The focus of this paper will be the twenty years representing, arguably, the height of the problematic of American appropriations of ‘French theory’, and the work of Derrida in particular. The exorbitant fortunes of the term ‘deconstruction’ and the reception of Derrida’s work in America can be traced from the moment of the John Hopkins University conference of 1966, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, to Derrida’s commentary on this reception at the ‘States of “Theory” ’ conference in 1987. The latter conference marked the foundation of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California at Irvine which itself in turn represented a particular moment of institutionalization of this body of work.

In 1975 Derrida began teaching at Yale University alongside de Man and Hillis Miller, who were to become known as ‘Yale deconstructionists’. A year previously he had founded, alongside others, the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique or GREPH in Paris. In the period in which the influence of Derrida’s work became an institutional phenomenon outside France, Derrida was thus engaged in a distinctively French institutional struggle and context, which will be examined here. The group which he helped to found campaigned on behalf of teaching philosophy in secondary schools. At the time when, beyond France, Derrida’s work became part of first ‘literary theory’ and then ‘theory’ tout court, a body of work which was marked by its productivity, internationality, and self-conscious eclecticism and interdisciplinarity, Derrida was involved in a campaign about philosophy as a school subject, the most traditional and conservative of humanities school subjects, zealously guarded by its ultra-traditionalist and conservative practitioners and upholders. These simultaneously unfolding arenas are paradoxical in relation to one another. That of ‘theory’, a literary critical and then multidisciplinary zone, produced in English, principally in the United States, with an expanding clientele within university teaching and research, and that of ‘philosophy’, a compulsory school subject throughout France, of interest primarily to those whose future employment was at stake.

This paper will examine the relationship between these two contexts for Derrida’s work in terms of firstly, the appropriation of GREPH as an essential reference-point, how it is habitually adduced by certain American critics, but not then examined further, as in effect the ‘answer’ to the question of deconstruction and politics and of radicalism. Secondly, it will turn to radicality in the sense of the institutionalization of theory, and the anxiety concerning the domestication of theory identified in relation to deconstruction by one of Derrida’s most successful American expositors, Jonathan Culler, in the early 1980s. Derrida’s work with GREPH forms part of his - long overlooked and untranslated - consideration of institutional questions in terms of the relationship of thought to its determinations, its institutional passage and its relation to putatively different and specific – culturally, institutionally, intellectually - contexts. This work, which forms the key focus here, is, as this paper will show, indispensable to any elaboration of the question of ‘French’ and ‘American’ deconstructions.