6 Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971
At the start of the academic year, in autumn 1968, while Derrida
was in Baltimore, a series of lectures began, organized by Tel Quel’s
‘Theoretical Study Group’ in the heart of Paris’s Saint-German-des-
Prés area. These evening gatherings, part of the still turbulent wake
of the May events, attracted huge audiences. It was Philippe Sollers
who opened the cycle on 16 October. The two following sessions
were led by Jean-Joseph Goux, a young scholar whom Derrida had
much admired since the publication in Tel Quel of his ‘Marx and the
inscription of labour’ and ‘Numismatics’.
Fascinated by Of Grammatology, Goux boldly extended
Derridean thought to several new fi elds. ‘It’s the most interesting
thing I’ve read about Marx,’ Derrida told him after the publica-
tion of his fi rst article. And though he had not been able to attend
the double lecture ‘God, father, phallus, language’, he was greatly
interested by this text when he did read it.^1 Goux embodied to
perfection the spirit of the collective volume Théorie d’ensemble
(Collective Theory) which ‘Tel Quel’ published at this time: they
wished to transcend traditional disciplines, if not to unify them,
at least to build real bridges between the most radical Marxism,
a Freudianism revised by Lacan, and the theory of writing.^2 It
is probably no exaggeration to see a sort of ‘Gouxo-Derridean’
infl ection in a concept such as phallogentricism, which Derrida
came to prefer increasingly to logocentrism from the early 1970s
onwards.
In January 1969, a few weeks after Derrida’s return to France,
three evening gatherings of the Theoretical Study Group were
devoted to ‘the engendering of the formula’ by Julia Kristeva. This
involved a reading of Sollers’ Numbers, as detailed as Derrida’s
‘Dissemination’, which appeared at almost the same time in two
issues of Critique. But Kristeva’s point of view, distinguishing
between ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’ to establish ‘semanalysis’,
was very diff erent from Derrida’s. ‘As regards Numbers,’ Sollers
now acknowledges, ‘it could be said that there was a theoretical