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It is quickly apparent in any investigation of Derrida's attitude to history, particularly in his early writings, that nothing is straightforward. Evidence cannot be found to support either a simple acceptance or rejection of "history" as a concept, or historicism as a commitment. It seems that this lesson was never learned by commentators who sought, in the 1970s, to align Derrida in a factious debate between historicism and formalism. Working with unsupportable caricatures of New Criticism, Myth Criticism and Structuralism as versions of formalism that banished all forms of historical perspective, it was the belief of commentators such as Gelley, Miller, Booth and Lentricchia that the promise of even the possibility of historical perspective in Derrida's work placed him outside the tradition of formalism in the United States.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307033_4

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