A Lucky Year 1967 171
with which Bounoure was very familiar – would work out soon. As
he would say a littler later, his relationship with Bounoure contin-
ued to sustain him in a permanent and fundamental way. Without
this ‘terrible proximity’ that brought them together, it seemed to
him that nothing held together any more, ‘not even this game with
nothing and nonsense, not even this desperate rigour that still needs
to regulate the game and the relationship with death’. So Derrida
dreamed of ‘very long, durable, interminable meetings, interspersed
with shared readings and ideas, punctuated by those great elliptical
exchanges that mark a great complicity’.^2
One of the surprises of the beginning of 1967 was a renewal of the
relationship with Gérard Granel. A sort of reversal of the power
relations between them was soon evident. Granel, who had so
intimidated Derrida during their time at Louis-le-Grand, the ‘prince
of philosophy’ before whom he felt himself to be invisible, had
heard many good things about his recent articles and was eager
to discover them. Derrida quickly sent him a series of off prints,
including in particular ‘Writing before the letter’ – the double article
from Critique – and ‘Freud and the scene of writing’. Granel fully
expressed his enthusiasm:
Reading your two great texts, the same day (and half the night)
that followed their arrival, was something like a constant rev-
elation and jubilation. Since such was the case, why not say
it as simply as that? [.. .] I have the feeling that a completely
essential voice [parole] – sorry! a ‘writing’ [écriture] – has seen
the light through you.^3Even though he knew that Derrida would soon revise these arti-
cles, developing them for other people to read, Granel said he was
really happy to have discovered them ‘in this rough form in which a
thought is born and breaks through. There are breaks and leaps in
them, and sometimes a prophetic chiaroscuro, that are more revela-
tory than any tamer text will ever be.’ The two men soon started to
write to one another frequently. Granel had been teaching at the
University of Toulouse for several years and was now completing
his thesis on Husserl. He needed to come to Paris at the beginning
of May and his keenest wish was to have a long ‘pow-wow’ with
Derrida, so struck was he by the conjunction between their two
ways of thinking.^4
Jean Piel, who valued Derrida more and more, regularly asked for
his advice on articles that were submitted to him for Critique. When
consulted on one of the earliest texts by Alain Badiou, an article on
Althusser, Derrida’s reply was both frank and open-minded: