A Lucky Year 1967 181
thanked Derrida warmly: Of Grammatology was, in this place, ‘like
a book by Galileo in the land of the Inquisition, or more simply a
civilized book in Barbary!’ A judgment which, in retrospect, seems
quite piquant.
For it was also from the United States that another warm letter
arrived, announcing an equally fruitful relationship: that in which
Paul de Man told Derrida how much he had been ‘thrilled and
interested’ by Of Grammatology. He expected this work to help in
the ‘clarifi cation and progression of [his] own thinking’, something
which Derrida’s Baltimore paper, and their fi rst conversations, had
already suggested.^39 As they talked over the breakfast table at the
conference the previous year, the two men had realized that they
were both interested in their diff erent ways in the Essay on the Origin
of Languages. This was the origin of a friendship which became
deep and enduring: after this fi rst encounter, Derrida would say,
nothing ever separated them, ‘not even a hint of disagreement’.^40
Shortly thereafter, de Man published a fi ne review of the book in
the Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which was followed by a major,
more critical article,^41 but in particular he very quickly started
encouraging his students at Cornell to look into this new thinker.
Samuel Weber, who was then writing his thesis under de Man’s
supervision, remembers hearing him talk about Derrida at the
beginning of 1966, even before the Baltimore conference:
Just after he read ‘Writing before the letter’ in Critique, he
spoke to me about it with enthusiasm. I immediately read
the article and it blew me away. It rapidly seemed to me that
Derrida was doing what Paul de Man was trying to do. So de
Man would have had every reason to feel at least ambivalent
about him, but I never felt this was the case. He felt neither
jealousy nor resentment for him, just a frank gratitude.^42It was at de Man’s request that, at the end of autumn 1967,
Derrida gave a seminar in Paris on ‘the philosophical foundations of
literary criticism’ for a dozen American students from Cornell and
Johns Hopkins. His course fascinated them mainly because Derrida
was particularly open to dialogue and individual contact. Like
several others, David Carroll remembered this time with special
intensity, since it was also here that he met his future wife:
This Paris seminar turned all my ideas on literature – most of
them, admittedly, received ideas – upside down. To put it in
crude and hasty terms, Jacques presented those attending the
seminar who were expecting something else, or who, like me,
didn’t know what they were expecting, with something com-
pletely new: a double, and doubly critical, mode of questioning