Writing Itself 1965–1966 161
How heavy it is to bear the absence of a friend
The friend who every evening came to this table
And who will never return, death is miserable
As it stabs you in the heart and deconstructs you.On the publication of its fi rst part in Critique, ‘Writing before
the letter’ created a real stir in intellectual circles. Michel Foucault
expressed his enthusiasm for ‘such a liberating text’: ‘In the order
of contemporary thought, it is the most radical text I have ever
read.’^15 Emmanuel Levinas assured Derrida that he too had been
‘captivated by these incandescent, arborescent pages’: ‘In spite of
all your loyalty to Heidegger, the vigour of your point of departure
announces the fi rst new book since his own works.’^16
As for Gabriel Bounoure, he again expressed his admiration for
‘all these capital texts’. And Derrida thanked him in lyrical terms:
‘What a help for me it is, this marvellous, generous attention that
keeps watch over me and whose presence, for two years now, has
been ceaselessly accompanying me on my travels. How immensely
lucky I am! I’ll never be able fully to express my gratitude.’ He
regretted just one thing: the geographical distance that stopped
them meeting up as often as he would have liked.
I need your advice so much, and your vigilant experience, the
light of your culture. I have long known it, but your last letter- from an ‘old Arab’ as you call yourself – confi rms me in this
feeling. I’d so much like you to tell me about Ibn Massara,
Corbin, Massignon.^17
According to François Dosse, the author of a monumental
History of Structuralism, 1966 marked the high tide of this new para-
digm. It was the year of The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
- an unexpected bestseller –, of the violent polemic between Roland
Barthes and Raymond Picard on the Nouvelle Critique, and of the
huge volume of the Écrits in which Lacan brought together texts
hitherto dispersed. While Derrida did not publish a book that year,
and was still unknown to the public at large, several articles and
lectures confi rmed that he was a highly signifi cant fi gure, one of the
‘great minds of the century’, as François Châtelet made so bold as
to say in Le Nouvel Observateur.
This was also the period in which Derrida gradually built up a new
entourage with more writers in it than philosophers and academics.
Derrida, very attentive to the books people sent him, wrote long
letters, aff ectionate and detailed, to friends such as Edmond Jabès
and Michel Deguy, and also to the authors of Tel Quel or those
close to the review, such as Jean-Pierre Faye, Marcelin Pleynet, Jean
Ricardou, and Claude Ollier.