136 Derrida 1963–1983
the Nouvelle revue française and various other reviews turned him
into the most infl uential poetry critic of his time. He helped to gain
recognition for Max Jacob, Pierre Jean Jouve, Henri Michaux,
Pierre Reverdy, and Jules Supervielle, and then discovered Georges
Schehadé and contributed a preface for Jabès’s fi rst book, which
had been written, claimed Jabès, ‘under his gaze’.^29 An alumnus
of the École Normale Supérieure, Bounoure joined the Resistance
from the start, and taught at the universities of Cairo and Rabat;
he also appeared as one of the main fi gures in the dialogue between
Arabic and Western civilization, a question in which Derrida was
already deeply interested.
On Jabès’s insistence, Derrida sent Bounoure off prints of all his
fi rst articles, accompanied by long letters. And Bounoure replied
each time, very attentively. From the very fi rst exchanges, even
though they had yet to meet, Derrida wrote in the most intimate and
confi dential tone. He described his uncomfortable situation, and
laid bare his fragility and his hesitations:
Your letter touched me more than discretion will permit me to
say. Nothing can encourage me as much as knowing that you
understand me, that you understand me with the confi dent
and generous fellow-feeling that you have so kindly shown me.
You can rest assured that I value it fully – my admiration for
you has long since prepared me for it. These encouragements,
your authority, are things which I greatly, urgently need. For
countless reasons, but in particular because I live in one society... that of philosophers, and in the margins of another – the
literature of Parisians – where I feel very ill at ease, very alone,
forever threatened, by malevolence and misunderstanding,
forever longing to turn my back on it, without knowing exactly
on what. I like teaching, but it is rather exhausting and, basi-
cally, distracts me (insofar as it provides me with a very worthy
alibi and opportunities for what is known as ‘success’) from
what I feel is the essential thing for me, distracts from what I
would like to write – something that requires another life.^30
The two men met in Paris in spring 1964. The friendship between
the young philosopher and the man who in his eyes was there to ‘shed
light on this strange path’ soon became particularly intense. Derrida
was touched and intimidated to see turned on him an attention
whose ‘generosity, force and rigour’ he had ‘long since known’.
Apart from the courage I draw from your closeness, which
reassures and confi rms me, there is the aff ection, of course,
which is born within us since we know we are together aff ected
by, exposed and assigned to the same wind, to the presence of