A Period of Withdrawal 1968 195
on the entire editorial board of Tel Quel, he was the only one who
was not an autodidact. Without ever being close to one another,
the two men had long had a more than merely polite relationship.
In 1964, Derrida sent an appreciative letter to Faye about his novel
Analogues. And Faye had on several occasions said how much he
admired Derrida’s work. When he received his copy of Writing and
Diff erence, Faye assured him that ‘Freud and the scene of writing’
was the ‘most exciting’ piece of philosophical writing that he had
read for years.^25 And after immersing himself in Of Grammatology,
he again told Derrida that, in his view, Derrida’s path was ‘the one
that counted, and more than any other’.^26
But the crisis that had been brewing for months between Sollers
and Faye broke out in autumn 1967, when Jacqueline Risset and
Pierre Rottenberg joined the editorial board of Tel Quel. Unhappy
at the way the review had been developing, and Kristeva’s growing
importance, Faye resigned on 15 November. Over the next few
weeks, he tried to bring Derrida over to his side and warned him
about the way his methods were being ‘misused’ in Tel Quel, espe-
cially in a recent text by Rottenberg. Faye said he was particularly
shocked by ‘the brusque way in which the opposition between
speech/writing had been equated with that in class struggle between
bourgeoisie/proletariat’.^27
Faye immediately set up his own review, Change, also published
by Le Seuil. Sollers viewed this as a stab in the back. Faye wrote
several times to Derrida, inviting him to lunch in the hope of making
an ally of him. But Derrida kept his distance, and stayed friendly
but fi rm. From then on there was a degree of mistrust between
the two men. Faye shortly afterwards remarked that he had asked
himself ‘a few questions’ while rereading Of Grammatology, and
invited Derrida to discuss them with him,^28 but there was no reply.
The ideological landscape in this period was as complex as it was
changing, and the confrontation between Tel Quel and Change can
be understood only as part of a much wider confi guration. After
the Argenteuil Conference in 1966, the French Communist Party
embarked on a new policy towards intellectuals. The monthly La
Nouvelle Critique, which enjoyed a relative autonomy within the
Party, opened up to avant-garde movements, and in particular to
Tel Quel, whose work suddenly started to be considered as ‘of a
high literary and scientifi c level’. Three fl amboyant young women
incarnated modernity in the review: Catherine Clément, Élisabeth
Roudinesco, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann. Derrida would have
dealings with them several times in the course of his career.
At the end of 1967, the editors of La Nouvelle Critique prefaced
an interview with Sollers and other contributors to the review,
stating how greatly ‘this work merits our sympathy and can teach
us quite a bit’.^29 It was in this spirit that, on 16 and 17 April 1968,