150 Derrida 1963–1983
that he would need for his thesis. He hoped that this work might
lead to a short book that he would submit for inclusion in the
‘Épiméthée’ series.^18
In 1964–5, for his fi rst offi cial year as caïman, Derrida gave a set
of lectures on ‘Heidegger and History’ that were original enough
for him to think he might get them published by Les Éditions de
Minuit. Unfortunately for him, the passions of his students were
currently being aroused by very diff erent questions: this was the
year of the famous seminar ‘Reading Capital’. In ten or so sessions
that soon led to a book, Althusser and his colleagues – Étienne
Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, and Roger Establet –
developed the concept of a ‘symptomatic reading’ and set out the
idea of an ‘epistemological break’ separating the young Marx, still
in thrall to Hegel, from the mature, fully Marxist Marx. Derrida
attended some of the sessions, but he felt isolated and ill at ease,
as he explained much later in a long interview on Althusser and
Marxism that he gave to Michael Sprinker and that was not
published in French:
This whole problematic struck me as probably necessary
within the Marxist fi eld that was also a political fi eld, marked
in particular by the infl uence of the Party – of which I was
not a member and which was emerging, if I may say so, only
slowly from Stalinism [.. .]. But at the same time, I found this
problematic – I wouldn’t say untutored or naïve, far from
it –, but, let’s say, too neglectful of the critical questions that
I then thought were necessary, maybe against Husserl and
Heidegger but at any rate through them. [.. .] I had the impres-
sion that their concept of history should have gone through
this questioning. [.. .] Their discourse seemed to me to yield
[.. .] to a ‘new-style’ scientism, which I could question, but
of course I was paralysed, since I didn’t want my critiques
to be confused with the coarse, self-interested critiques that
were coming from the Right and the Left, especially from the
Communist Party.^19Derrida felt all the more condemned to silence because the
discourse of the Althusserians was accompanied by a sort of ‘intel-
lectual terrorism’ or at least ‘theoretical intimidation’. ‘To formulate
questions in a style that appeared, shall we say, phenomenological,
transcendental or ontological was immediately considered suspi-
cious, backward, idealistic, even reactionary.’ And yet history,
ideology, production, class struggle, the very idea of a ‘last instance’
still remained, in Derrida’s view, problematic notions that were not
properly questioned by Althusser and his followers.