A Lucky Year 1967 183
whole article, at least this extremely brutal paragraph. But Derrida,
now a member of the editorial board of Critique, reminded Foucault
of his own self-imposed rule: ‘not to intervene, either for or against,
on any article concerning [him]’.^47 The consequences soon made
themselves felt: these few lines, though modifi ed at the request
of Jean Piel, led to a serious cooling of the relationship between
Derrida and Foucault. In Derrida’s view, Granel’s article was even
the precipitating factor that led to Foucault’s violent riposte in
1972.
Granel wanted nothing to do with this unpleasant quarrel. In the
long letter he sent to Derrida a few weeks after the publication of the
article, he said yet again that he was struck by the ‘unexpected close-
ness’ of their work, the ‘community of destiny suddenly revealed,
as if, having for ten years been a prisoner in a maximum isolation
cell, [he] had suddenly heard an Other knocking on the wall or on
the pipes’. He felt that only the two of them could make progress in
philosophy, since ‘Heidegger is going to die, and in any case [their]
writing, though it is based on his work, begins after him’. Jean
Beaufret did not do the work one might have expected of him, and
all the rest was lost in the anonymity of ‘disciplehood’. Apart from
what interested Derrida and him, there was nothing but Marxism,
neo-Thomism, and the Sorbonne – in short, ‘various forms of an
irremediable erring’.^48
The fi rst interview Derrida gave appeared in December 1967 in Les
Lettres françaises, the cultural weekly edited by Louis Aragon. In
this minutely rewritten article, the author explained to Henri Ronse,
in a deliberately labyrinthine fashion, the relation between the three
works he had just published:
Derrida: One can take Of Grammatology as a long essay
articulated in two parts (whose juncture is not empirical, but
theoretical, systematic) into the middle of which one could
staple Writing and Diff erence. Grammatology often calls
upon it. In this case the interpretation of Rousseau would
also be the twelfth ‘table’ of the collection. Inversely, one
could insert Of Grammatology into the middle of Writing and
Diff erence, since six of the texts in that work preceded – de
facto and de jure – the publication in Critique (two years ago)
of the articles that announced Of Grammatology; the last
fi ve texts, beginning with ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’
are engaged with the grammatological opening. But things
cannot be reconstituted so easily, as you may well imagine.
In any case, that two ‘volumes’ are to be inscribed one in the
middle of the other is due, you will agree, to a strange geom-
etry, of which these texts are doubtless the contemporaries.