le Jacques est mort, vive le Jacques

"From philosophy, rhetoric, to make of a text a flower, to mount it, or rather, to have it come round and mount itself, reckoning with a lapidary's instinct."

This is the best I can do to recall the opening of Derrida's "White Mythology," but it's hard to overstate the impact that it had on a kid from the south some twenty years back. The idea that the texts of philosophy, of civics, or whatever other texts you could find were shot through with figures, indeed, that you couldn't strictly distinguish between the literal (letter being just another metaphor) and the figural was huge and hugely liberating. And hard to argue with.

Say what you will about theory in general, that it's been simultaneously abstruse, obtuse, and inane, it's all true. But Derrida and his generation brought an energy and a verve to the humanities which had been missing. There had been visionaries in the previous generation (one thinks of Kenneth Burke, and Wittgenstein of course), but the French came in, generated buzz, and broke things open to new lines of enquiry in a way that a Jurgen Habermas, a Yurii Lotman, or a Seymour Chatman could never dream of doing. Is Derrida to blame that the American academy lacked the backbone to know when to call bullshit?