‘Fanciful associations’

This article concerns the expression ‘logical phallusies’, imputed to Jacques Derrida by Barry Smith in 1992 in a letter arguing against the proposed award to Derrida of an honorary doctorate at Cambridge. Derrida insisted that this expression appeared nowhere in his oeuvre – it has never been found – and yet it has endured, in discussions of Derrida’s work and general legacy, more than any other aspect of Derrida’s ‘Cambridge Affair’. I address two cases of the expression’s weird stubbornness, arguing that its misattribution to Derrida is a gesture which Derrida’s work guards against and undermines – even deconstructs – in advance. The article sounds a note of caution about the ‘post-theoretical’ practice of assimilating philosophers and theorists to the humanities via the decontextualised appropriation of putatively synecdochic buzzwords.