A Lucky Year 1967 175
The essential thing is that you gain the qualifi cation you are
seeking; your renown will not increase thereby (the survey in Les
Temps modernes indicates that you already belong among the
Paris locomotives, though you do not belong to any of the ter-
rorist groups), but we will be glad to be able to tell you offi cially
of the esteem we have felt for you for such a long time.^15In actual fact, the viva was not to proceed as serenely as de
Gandillac suggested. As Derrida told Michel Deguy, ‘beneath the
academic laurels and the professions of admiration, beneath the
“open-armed” welcome’ that Henri Gouhier mentioned, the session
was ‘an act of war – bitter, raging – in which all the current ten-
sions weighed down on the debate, with the exception of my text,
which none of them had managed to read’.^16 In a letter to Gabriel
Bounoure, Derrida insisted on what had struck him as ‘a profound
lack of understanding’, and even as ‘a blinding resistance’, especially
on the part of Ricoeur, which surprised and hurt him. ‘And the
misunderstandings built up, even among those who were quick to
applaud. I don’t feel at home either in the university system [.. .] or
outside the university system. But is it a matter of being at home?’^17
This was all the more dismaying because it was just the thèse
annexe that was being examined, and so Derrida was far from
having put his university obligations behind him. Developing the
subject of his thèse d’État, he agreed with Jean Hyppolite that he
would put forward a new interpretation of Hegel’s theory of the
sign – more specifi cally, ‘of speech and writing in Hegel’s semiol-
ogy’, though he did not really know when he would fi nd the energy
to write it.^18
Meanwhile, after these months of uninterrupted work, Derrida was
in Nice, where he told everyone he was doing nothing: ‘I’m in the
sea and the sunshine from morning to evening, so I can rediscover
something of the climate of the other shore. And I’m letting things
settle.’ He had ‘the violent longing to shed my skin, my old skin’, and
dreamed of writing something completely diff erent, or of ‘taking up
very old, very archaic plans, buried under the urgent tasks of Paris
and university life’.^19 Unfortunately, he would soon need to be
thinking of his classes for the following year, on Hegel and on the
logic of Port-Royal. ‘I could do with at least one year of absolute
peace and quiet... Even talking about it will make me drop dead.’^20
His correspondence with Philippe Sollers was still regular and
friendly. ‘I always think of you,’ the writer assured him, ‘as one
of the sole “authorities” to whom I feel any desire to show what is
happening – and being written – through me.’^21 Derrida had wanted
to write to him sooner, but time had gone by very quickly, between
‘feeling a bit suff ocated by family life, pretty numbed overall’ and