How to explain the cachet of deconstruction, the way it has infiltrated public discourse? At the crudest level of its appeal, the word announces the writer’s knowingness: I’m hip to what’s hip. I know what’s happening in the world of big ideas. A Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Mark Horowitz, trying to explain the current French enthusiasm for movies starring Mickey Rourke, places the deconstruction craze in the perspective of "a constant war between the U.S. and France." In Horowitz’s words, "We sent them Jerry Lewis, so they retaliated by sending us deconstruction and Jacques Derrida. . . . Deconstruction conforms to an American preconception of the cerebral French in the same way that Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor represents a Frenchman’s impression of an American type.

David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man