156 Derrida 1963–1983
Over and above the expectations that Event touches off in
me, over and above all the ways in which you are preceding
me on a path which I think I recognize from a place beyond
memory, over and above all that my comments could say,
coiling around your book which is already its own comment-
ary, in other words eff acing itself as it writes itself [.. .] and
writing as it withdraws [.. .], over and above this comment-
ary that I dare not undertake, that I dare not tear from its
ongoing momentum within me, I admired – is it allowed? – the
writer, the marvellous sureness which he maintains at the very
moment he stands on the front line and the ultimate peril of
writing [.. .].^2The tone becomes more personal when Derrida confesses how much
Sollers’ book awakens in him the love of a literature before which
he feels fragile and, as it were, intimidated. ‘Will you be annoyed if
I tell you that, yet again, you have written a very beautiful book? At
all events, I’m very happy, for – I’d never dare say this in public – I
still love beautiful books and believe in them. I still have, I have
kept from my youth, a certain amount of literary devotion.’ The
postscript shows the very high level he has assigned to Sollers’ book:
‘Have you read Awaiting Oblivion by Blanchot? He’s just sent it to
me, I don’t know why, two years after it came out. I read it just
before Event. Despite countless diff erences, there is something of a
fraternal link between the two.’
Sollers was, as may be imagined, deeply touched by the generosity
of this reading. He was pleased by this ‘unreserved communication’^3
and the ideas that came with it, and drew much closer to Derrida
over the following months. Their correspondence was prolifi c and
their encounters frequent. On Derrida’s part, one senses the desire
for a friendship in which the two would almost merge into one, like
the friendship he had enjoyed with Michel Monory.
Derrida’s fi rst essay on Antonin Artaud, ‘Le parole souffl ée’,
was published in March, in issue 20 of Tel Quel; in the same special
number appeared a text by Sollers, another by Paule Thévenin, and
eleven published letters from Artaud to Anaïs Nin. Derrida’s article
proposed an innovative reading of an as yet little-known author. In
1965, only the fi rst fi ve volumes of the Oeuvres complètes had been
published by Gallimard.
In this superb article, Derrida begins pondering the particular
diffi culty of holding a discourse about Artaud. Too many comment-
aries merely enclose him within ready-made categories, denying
yet again ‘the enigma of fl esh which wanted properly to be named
Antonin Artaud’.^4 Even the fi ne discussion by Maurice Blanchot
tends to treat him as a case, without the ‘untamed’ quality of his
experience being really taken into account.