200 Derrida 1963–1983
sent this young woman to fi ll a post as professor at Nanterre even
before she had had the viva for her thesis. Given a grandstand view,
she had observed the events of May with the greatest attention,
surprised by their extent and the desire for total upheaval that they
demonstrated.
Just after his meeting, Las Vergnas announced to Cixous that the
Minister was entrusting her with a ‘prefabricated new university, an
off shoot of the Sorbonne in the forest of Vincennes’.^42 He asked the
Joyce specialist, whose address book was already impressively full,
to help him set up an experimental university. Derrida was the fi rst
person Cixous contacted. On 7 August, she sent him a telegram (the
house in Ris-Orangis still had no telephone): ‘Need advice plans
pilot University.’^43
As Cixous later explained:
I asked Jacques Derrida to be my adviser (in secret: he wasn’t
appointed, but was acknowledged by Las Vergnas). Through
him, I could also be sure of recruiting a commission of experts,
a scholarly circle that would guarantee the quality of those
recruited, including Georges Canguilhem, or Roland Barthes.
For scholarly legitimacy was of course the condition of the
venture.^44Derrida showed no desire to go and teach in Vincennes himself.
At the time, he still felt quite at ease at Normale Sup. But this project
for an experimental university interested him and he was heavily
involved in the preliminary discussions held in Cixous’s apart-
ment in the rue Lhomond, with François Châtelet, Jean-Claude
Passeron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Lucette Finas, Gérard Genette,
Tzvetan Todorov, and a few others. Derrida’s role was naturally
crucial in laying the basis for the department of philosophy, but he
was just as enthusiastic about the introduction of psychoanalysis,
which at the time was not taught in any university. Since at that
period Lacan and his colleagues did not wish to have anything to do
with it, Derrida suggested entrusting responsibility for the depart-
ment to Serge Leclaire, a doctor and psychoanalyst of Lacanian
allegiances, and had his choice ratifi ed by Canguilhem.^45
For some months, Derrida had also been pulling strings to help
Bernard Pautrat escape from the lycée where he had been dying of
boredom. Though barely twenty-four, he was suddenly plucked out
and sent to the rue d’Ulm to assist Althusser and Derrida with the
philosophy students. With the arrival of Pautrat, Derrida could call
on the services of an accomplice, almost a disciple. The Marxist grip
on the École was very tight, and Althusser had probably wanted to
maintain some balance within the school. Pautrat was, to be sure,
close to the ‘mao-spontex’, those leftists characteristic of the scene