A Period of Withdrawal 1968 193
add the following dedication: ‘For Emmanuel Levinas, to whom,
for forty years, I have been bound by a friendship that is closer to
me than I am myself: in a relation of invisibility with Judaism.’
On 2 April 1968, Blanchot and Derrida co-signed a letter that
they intended to send to all those contributing to the volume. They
explained that after ‘a diffi cult debate’ they had decided to include
their contributions in the volume after all: Beaufret had denied
that he had uttered the most serious of the remarks in question,
and rejected the interpretation given to the others, so they had not
felt they had a right to pronounce, by withdrawing, ‘an accusation
so serious that it would have simultaneously meant a sentence of
guilty’.^17 But these letters, sent by Blanchot to the publisher for
forwarding, would never reach their addressees.
After this period, a bit too full of turmoil for his taste, Derrida felt
the desire to settle down to some quiet work. That year’s agrégation
programme allowed him to rediscover such ‘inexhaustible’ authors
as Plato and Hegel. As he wrote to Gabriel Bounoure, ‘in spite of
the huge library of books that academics have written on them, you
always have the feeling that you haven’t yet begun to read them.
This is basically what interests me the most.’^18
The article ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, published in two issues of Tel Quel
(winter and spring 1968), to some extent marked a new, freer, more
explicitly literary tone. The fi rst lines were to become famous:
A text is not a text unless it hides from the fi rst comer, from the
fi rst glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game.
A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and
its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a
secret, it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present,
into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the
risk of being defi nitively lost. Who will ever know of such
disappearances?^19The last paragraphs are just as striking:
The night passes. In the morning, knocks are heard at the door.
They seem to be coming from outside, this time...
Two knocks... four...- But maybe it’s just a residue, a dream, a bit of dream left
over, an echo of the night... that other theater, those knocks
from without...^20
This did not stop the main part of this long article – springing as
it did from a seminar at Normale Sup – from proposing a minute,