6 - The reception of Derrida's work in France and America

Summary

The successful introduction of Jacques Derrida's work to American literary criticism raises interesting sociological questions. The evaluation of cultural goods is highly dependent on contextual cultural norms. How then does a cultural good gain legitimacy in two cultural markets as different as France and the United States? Or, how can a French philosopher gain acceptance in the land of empiricism? More generally, what are the conditions under which a cultural product becomes defined as important? This paper analyzes the cultural, institutional, and social conditions of interpretive theories by analyzing the legitimation of Jacques Derrida's work in France and the United States.

I argue that the intellectual legitimation of a theory in different settings depends on its adaptability to specific environmental requirements, which permits a fit between the work and specific cultural and institutional features of various markets. I show that the legitimation of Derrida's work in the United States was made possible by its adaptation to an existing intellectual agenda and by a shift in public from a general audience to a specialized literary one. Also, Derrida benefited from the concurrent importation of a number of other French authors, which created an American market for French interpretive theories.

I proceed by reconstructing the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and social conditions of the intellectual legitimation of Derrida's work. These conditions refer to (1) the construction, assessment, and institutionalization of deconstruction theory as an important theory by Derrida, his peers, and the intellectual public and (2) the structured cultural and institutional system of environmental constraints on the construction process, that is, the rules of the game, the structural requirements that Derrida's work and personal trajectory had to meet in order for his theory to be defined as important.