In response to being lionized by his fans and journalists, Derrida could have done an Andy Worhol from the documentary _Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol_ (1991): "I'm speechless."
For Carl Remick, here's a key to understanding the political economy of the fetishization of poststructuralism: "Academics gutted by government cost-cutting and corporate narrowness now have a renewed faith in abstract ideas" (Peter Ellingsen, "Jacques Be Nimble"). "'Their faces had the same kind of almost ecstasy that people have with the Pope or Dalai Lama," says Monash English professor and tour organiser Kevin Hart. 'They were queued up. One common thread was how they felt revitalized by hearing him. So many told me they were re-dedicating themselves to their work.'" Postmodernism, at one extreme, may inspire a perverse ethic of "self-help through helplessness."
Peter Starr on another Jacques:
***** In the opening of this chapter I suggested that it was Lacan's relentless critique of the demand for the One (truth, meaning, system, Revolution, etc.) that caused him to focalize the desire for the One; Lacan became the "subject presumed to know," in other words, by virtue of his attempts to undermine the image of the analyst as one who knows....That he was in fact fully aware of this specific instance of Möbius logic is clear from the present passage.... (_Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May '68_, p. 74) *****
The same applies to Jacques Derrida.
Yoshie