176 Derrida 1963–1983
the ‘renewed “Nuptials” with the Mediterranean’. ‘In my present
state of idleness, which I had not experienced for long months, a
new piece of work is perhaps coming into being in silence and new
measures being taken.’^22
That year, the friendship between Sollers and Derrida would
encounter its fi rst snag, directly linked to a newcomer: Julia Kristeva.
She had arrived from Bulgaria in December 1965 to do a doctorate
in comparative literature, and had met Goldmann, Genette, and
Barthes, and Sollers shortly after. The beauty, intelligence, and cha-
risma of the young woman, her prestige as a ‘foreigner’,^23 created
an immediate sensation. The new reference points she brought with
her – Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian formalists – and the concepts
she rapidly coined, such as intertextuality and paragrammatism,
ensured that she had made a name for herself on the Paris intellec-
tual scene within a few months. She published her work fi rst in the
Marxist review La Pensée, then, starting in spring 1967, in Critique
and Tel Quel.
To begin with, Kristeva’s relations with Derrida were excellent.
She was captivated by Derrida’s highly original way of reading
Husserl. In particular, she thought that he was the only philo-
sopher capable of linking a phenomenology already fi ltered through
psychoanalysis with literary experience.^24 But a fi rst incident soon
raised its ugly head: Sollers told Derrida he was very annoyed with
him for having shown to François Wahl Kristeva’s article ‘Meaning
and fashion’ (a discussion of Barthes’s System of Fashion) before
its publication in Critique. When Derrida admitted that he was
surprised and hurt by this rebuke, Sollers immediately apologized;
nothing, he said, was more intolerable to him than the idea of a
misunderstanding between them. But he wanted to add a few details:
Kristeva: the question, here, is more serious than you seem
to imagine. On the subject of the appearance, as sudden as it
was decisive, of these new ideas, there have been many fl urries,
many discussions, many little things. I’m thinking of F. Wahl
telling me that the article on Bakhtin published in Critique was
‘crazy’; I’m thinking of some argument over how Miller and
Badiou had uttered a radical condemnation of the text that Tel
Quel has published; I’m thinking of some psychoanalyst who
has launched out on a violent attack on some of her work; I’m
thinking of the way that, as in a test tube, all the symptoms of
what used to be called a cabal, of the fi nest vintage, have made
their appearance.^25The truth, undisclosed in this letter as in their meetings over the
next few months, was that Derrida was not told one essential fact:
Kristeva and Sollers had fallen in love and then got married, in