A Period of Withdrawal 1968 201
straight after May ’68 who favoured the revolutionary spontaneity
of the masses rather than parties and structured organizations. But
he was mainly a reliable, brilliant philosopher who had come top in
the agrégation and was perfectly ‘Derrido-compatible’.^46
Pautrat was delighted about his imminent arrival at Normale
Sup. But he had worrying news of Althusser, whose state of health
was improving only slowly: he would be away for at least the
whole of October. This came at a particularly inconvenient time,
since Derrida himself was preparing to leave Paris until the end of
November: the Americans had been so dazzled by his performance
in 1966 that they had invited him to teach at Johns Hopkins for two
months – a proposal he could hardly turn down, if only because of
the fi nancial perks. So Pautrat would have to look after the philo-
sophers at the start of the academic year by himself. As he put it: ‘I’ll
do my best, of course, to cope, but I can’t deny I’m more than a little
anxious about it.’^47
At the end of September, Jacques and Marguerite fl ew to the United
States with their two sons: Pierre was just over fi ve, and they had
just celebrated Jean’s fi rst birthday. It was in the house in Cloverhill
Road, in Baltimore, that he would take his fi rst steps.
Derrida was prone to worry, and had been nervous about this stay.
In fact everything went as well as it could have done. He soon struck
up a friendship with Richard Macksey, director of the Humanities
Centre at Johns Hopkins and co-organizer of the 1966 conference.
Derrida appreciated his ‘magical hospitality’ and his incredible per-
sonal library, ‘the most miraculous and dependable’^48 that he would
ever encounter. He made a pilgrimage – which would become a
repeated ritual – to the tomb and the room of Edgar Allan Poe.
The fi rst seminar Derrida gave at Baltimore took up and ampli-
fi ed the one he had given at Normale Sup on ‘Plato’s pharmacy’. But
he also proposed readings of Baudelaire, Artaud, Nietzsche, and,
especially, Mallarmé, sketching out what later became ‘The double
session’. As Derrida in those days taught in French, only a score of
listeners came along. But many of them were bowled over, includ-
ing J. Hillis Miller, then close to Georges Poulet and the Geneva
School, who became one of the great fi gures of deconstruction in
America. As Miller remembers:
When I turned up at the fi rst session, I was afraid my French
might not be good enough for me to follow. But I was straight-
away fascinated by the power of Derrida’s discourse. It was
extraordinary, I’d never heard anything like it. Very quickly,
we became friends, and got into the habit of having lunch
together once a week. To begin with, each of us spoke his own
language, then he started to talk to me in English.^49