Richard Stern

At five o’clock on Friday, 19 April, anniversary of the shot heard round the world, Jacques Derrida gave the first of the four annual Frederick Ives Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago. Tom Mitchell, chairman of the English Department and editor of Critical Inquiry, the English-language journal in which Derrida most often publishes, introduced him to a crowd that filled not only the seats and aisles of the Max Palevsky Auditorium, but the lobby, where there was a PA system, and the street, where there wasn’t. The introduction was graceful, Derrida’s acknowledgment of it not only graceful but an integral part of the talk, which, like its successors, dealt with questions of gifts, gratitude, ‘giving and taking time’, existence, narrative, fiction, tobacco, luck, chance, ‘perhaps’, and a few other subjects already part of the Derrida canon.