A Period of Withdrawal 1968 199
the darkness. What you give me is really a crazy and unhoped-for
support.’^38 The facts of the matter were more ambiguous. For this
moment of extreme closeness also marked a subtle form of rivalry
between the fi ction and the commentary on it. Mixing almost inex-
tricably his text together with Sollers’, the philosopher had managed
to give the writer the feeling of a ‘carnivorous osmosis’.^39 Thrust
would soon lead to parry.
At the beginning of May, Derrida joined Marguerite and the
children at Les Rassats. Eager to see Sollers and Kristeva again, in
calmer circumstances after ‘all the jolts and all the silences’ that had
kept them apart since the spring, he took advantage of this brief
stay in Charente to go and spend a day in their company in the Île
de Ré. But shortly after this meeting, a new event came along to
threaten their relationship. On 20 August, troops of the Warsaw
Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ‘Prague Spring’. While
Aragon and Les Lettres françaises clearly came out against the
Soviet intervention, the telqueliens took a harder line and claimed
they supported it. As Sollers wrote to his friend Jacques Henric:
‘You mustn’t count on me to disarm, not even for a second, the Red
Army (not to mention the Bulgarian tanks for which I even feel a
guilty passion). The whiff s of a sordidly self-interested humanism
wafting up are the last straw as far as I am concerned.’^40 At a dinner,
Paule Thévenin launched ‘into a violent diatribe, denouncing the
Czech counter-revolutionaries and singing the praises of the Soviet
Union’, which led to a severe chill in relations.^41 It is easy to guess
why: Marguerite Derrida, whose mother’s family lived in Prague,
viewed things with, let us say, a diff erent eye.
Summer 1968 was also marked by the start of a venture in which
Derrida would play a role both discreet and essential: the creation
of Vincennes. Within the highly conservative government formed
by Maurice Couve de Murville, Edgar Faure, the new Minister
of Education, was an exception. A liberal and a modernizer, he
enjoyed the confi dence of General de Gaulle, who, while still reeling
from the May ’68 movement, had realized that the French university
system needed to change as a matter of urgency.
On Monday, 5 August 1968, Raymond Las Vergnas, the new Dean
of the Sorbonne, set out to Edgar Faure his dream of a university
completely diff erent from those that then existed in France, a uni-
versity open to workers, in particular those without a baccalaureate,
where the education given would be fl exible and interdisciplinary,
where professors competent within their fi elds could be recruited
even without the qualifi cations traditionally required. This project
did not emerge from nowhere. It was mainly the fruit of conversa-
tions that Las Vergnas had had with Hélène Cixous. A few months
earlier, in an astonishing show of institutional strength, he had