Derrida: A Biography

5

A Period of Withdrawal

1968

Henry Bauchau and his wife Laure ran a luxury boarding school
in Gstaad, with rooms spread out among three chalets. At the
invitation of the Bauchaus, the Derridas spent two Christmases
in succession here. Their long evenings together gave rise to a real
friendship, both intellectual and intimate. A few weeks later, Henry
Bauchau wrote what a vivid memory he had of the times they had
spent together:

For us, this encounter, in the snow, as if in some odd timeless

zone, was a kind of event. Admittedly, the new ideas played

a part, but contact and the personalities involved were much

more important. I was very struck by the mixture of rigour and

gentleness in your own personality, your extreme openness to

everything. [.. .] Something happened in the course of these few

days, something I do not seek to defi ne, but something that was

of great signifi cance for Laure and myself.^1

In a later letter, Bauchau emphasized how important this meeting
had been for him:

It was less your thinking than yourself. From this mixture

of gentleness and fi rmness, rigour and everydayness, a way

of listening to this time without rejecting any of it, especially

paternity. To move beyond the world of the Father without

denying the links of paternity – this gave me a great deal to

think about when I saw the four of you.^2

Bauchau, already a novelist, was, however, disconcerted by a
conversation in which Derrida told him that he was writing for a
‘very defi nite, restricted’ audience, one that would then be in a posi-
tion to transmit his thought. In his reply, the author of Writing and
Diff erence came back to this decision, explaining that his type of
work involved applying one’s strength in the right way: mediations