A Lucky Year 1967 173
on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, ‘ “Genesis and structure”
and phenomenology’,^7 ‘La parole souffl ée’, ‘Freud and the scene
of writing’, ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representa-
tion’ (Derrida’s second text on Artaud), ‘From restricted economy
to general economy, a Hegelianism without reserve’ (an article on
Georges Bataille, published in L’Arc), and ‘Structure, sign and play
in the discourse of the human sciences’ (the Baltimore paper). The
work ended with ‘Ellipsis’, an unpublished piece on Jabès, dedicated
to Gabriel Bounoure.
For Derrida, Writing and Diff erence was his fi rst really personal
book, the fi rst in which his name appeared as author. As he would
throughout his life, he sent several signed copies to his friends, past
and present. Opinions among his old classmates from Louis-le-
Grand or the rue d’Ulm were divided. Jean-Claude Pariente was
very positive: ‘I am glad to rediscover, in a more mature and as
if sublimated form, of course, the philosophical élan of the Jackie
of my youth, and the conceptual liveliness that means that your
writings never leave one indiff erent.’^8 But though Jean Bellemin-
Noël started off by saying that he was ‘profoundly happy’ to see
Derrida ‘among the “great” of our world, and increasingly above a
good number of them’,^9 he soon admitted that most of the texts in
the volume went ‘over his head’ and, in short, left him rather cold:
‘I immersed myself in your book sooner than I had imagined. I
haven’t read it all and, even out of friendship, I won’t read it all.’^10
Several of those he had once been close to did not reply, including
Michel Monory.
Luckily, other readers – some of the most important – expressed
great enthusiasm. Michel Foucault, who knew almost all the texts
collected in Writing and Diff erence, had just read them through one
after another and was struck by the ‘admirably discontinuous work
that they comprise’:
In their juxtaposition, in their interstices, an amazing book
comes into view, one which has been written non-stop in a
single line, from the very fi rst. The reader realizes that he has
read without realizing it not just the texts themselves, but this
text within the texts which now appears. I don’t need to tell you
how eager I am to read the ones announced.^11A few weeks later, Emmanuel Levinas wrote to thank Derrida,
though he also expressed his reservations. He had taken this oppor-
tunity to reread the pages devoted to his work, ‘in which so much
sympathy is joined with so many incompatibilities’.^12 Derrida wrote
to him on 6 June 1967, just after the outbreak of what would soon
be called the Six-Day War. ‘Glued to the radio’ since the start of the
confl ict, he admitted that he had for some time been ‘obsessed by