162 Derrida 1963–1983
He would enjoy a long friendship with Roger Laporte, fi ve years
older than he was and close to Blanchot and Levinas. The vast
project Laporte was gradually putting together, under the title
‘Biography’, was bound to fascinate Derrida. The essential thing for
Laporte was to ‘reverse the relation, established since the beginning,
between living and writing’: ‘Whereas ordinary life precedes the way
we narrate it, I have wagered that a certain life is neither anterior
nor exterior to writing [.. .] one cannot narrate a story that has
not yet taken place, a completely original [inouïe] life to which only
writing would grant access.’^18
The fi rst volume, Vigil, was published by Gallimard in 1963, but
Derrida discovered it only in 1965, on the advice of Michel Foucault.
He expressed his enthusiasm so keenly that Laporte soon sent him
the manuscript of the second instalment, A Voice of Consummate
Silence. Derrida was just as susceptible to this exploration of the
limits of language, often close in tone to the mystics and negative
theology: ‘I am profoundly convinced, against Wittgenstein, whose
words you no doubt know, that “what we cannot speak about we
must (not) pass over in silence.” ’^19 Laporte’s work struck Derrida
as a mirror of his own investigations, fascinating and scary simul-
taneously. In many ways it represented what he dreamed of moving
towards, while at the same time feeling a need to protect himself
from it by philosophy:
I think right now that your enterprise has meaning, that it
is, in my view, writing at its most radical. And that’s why it
allures me, and that’s why it is only painfully and impotently
that I renounce that type of writing. [.. .] Standing near this
limit is threatening in at least two respects, and that’s why I
am keeping away from it as much as possible so as not to be
destroyed by the threat (feast or death) and as close as possible
so as not to doze off. Threatening to life – to that minimum of
serenity indispensable for its maintenance, and for vigilance –
and, on the other hand, threatening to Discourse (or writing).
[.. .] I often have the feeling that through my ‘fear’, which
one day I will be able to put behind me, I have fl ed from the
route of the heart that you have managed to follow. [.. .] So I
am trying to do the same as you, with an extra mask – that is
to say, between my ‘life’ and my ‘thought’ an extra detour, a
supplementary ‘other’ and a very painful (believe me) indirect
discourse.^20Thanks to Marie-Claire Boons, a Belgian psychoanalyst close
to Philippe Sollers, Derrida also met Henry Bauchau, a writer still
practically at the start of his career even though he was over fi fty.
He had settled in Gstaad, in Switzerland, where together with his