A Lucky Year 1967 177
total privacy, on 2 August 1967. At that time, they both insisted on
keeping this secret, if not clandestine.^26
Meanwhile, Marguerite and Jacques returned to Fresnes at the
start of August to await the birth of their second child. Jean – Louis
Emmanuel – Derrida was born on 4 September 1967, a little earlier
than expected, which did not stop him from seeming healthy and
tranquil. The choice of these three fi rst names was no coincidence:
Jean was Genet’s fi rst name, Louis that of Althusser, Emmanuel
that of Levinas. Over the days following the birth, Derrida had to
take over domestic responsibilities, something to which he was not
used. With two children, the Fresnes apartment was becoming really
cramped. Jacques and Marguerite started to think about buying
a new house. Even though the state of their fi nances was soon to
improve, thanks to the seminar that Derrida started giving a small
group of American students, they soon realized that they would
need to move a bit further away from Paris.
1967 was defi nitely a year of births, for two new books by Derrida
were published in the autumn.
Speech and Phenomena was published by Presses Universitaires
de France, in Jean Hyppolite’s series. This short work presented
itself as a mere ‘introduction to the problem of the sign in Husserl’s
phenomenology’. But in actual fact, the book developed the ques-
tions discussed in Writing and Diff erence and Of Grammatology,
focusing, in another way, on the privilege granted to presence and
voice throughout the history of the West. As Derrida explains in the
introduction:
We have thus a prescription for the most general form of
our question: do not phenomenological necessity, the rigor
and subtlety of Husserl’s analysis, the exigencies to which
is responds and which we must fi rst recognize, nonetheless
conceal a metaphysical presupposition? [.. .]
What is at issue, then, in the privileged example of the
concept of sign, is to see the phenomenological critique of
metaphysics betray itself as a moment within the history of
metaphysical assurance. Better still, our intention is to begin
to confi rm that the recourse to phenomenological critique is
metaphysics itself, restored to its original purity in its historical
achievement.^27The problem, in Derrida’s view, is in short the deepest ambition
driving Husserl’s investigations: the desire to liberate an ‘original’
lived experience and reach ‘the thing itself’, in its ‘pure presence’. In
Speech and Phenomena he endeavours to bring out the philosophical
implications ‘of the interdependency that one must accept between