Derrida: A Biography

208 Derrida 1963–1983

competition between Derrida and Kristeva.’^3 This is also the
impression of Goux, who was at the time friendly with all three
protagonists:

There was doubtless an anxiety on the part of Sollers that

Derrida would have too great an impact on Tel Quel and

his own work. Beyond the homage, Sollers must have read

Derrida’s immense article on Numbers as an attempt at appro-

priation. Sollers was fl attered and at the same time scared

by this text, which was much more than a commentary. And

Derrida’s growing prestige must have seemed dangerous, just

when it was mainly important to foster the rise of Julia Kristeva

as the main theorist of the review.^4

But for now, any confl ict was muted, if not virtual, and everything
seemed to be passing off for the best. On 26 February and 5 March
1969, Derrida presented to a packed hall a lecture that bore no title,
but was later published in Tel Quel as ‘The double session’. Over
the years, Derrida had gained considerably in confi dence: what he
proposed on these two evenings was more a performance than the
delivery of a traditional lecture. As Catherine Clément wrote to him
shortly afterwards:

What you are doing is rather like an incantation, and diff ers

from it by an appeal to writing; like a mime, and diff ers from

it by the non-representable; like opera – a marriage of voice-

gesture-body-setting – and diff ers from it by the absence of

distance; like a clown [.. .], and diff ers from it by the lack of

diff erence among the signifi ers: none of them is privileged, as

being more fertile in un/reading than any other.^5

It was Mallarmé, long since one of Derrida’s fetish authors, who
was the centre of ‘The double session’. And it was, inter alia, the
foundations of thematic criticism that he endeavoured to decon-
struct, in the shape of its most ambitious realization: Jean-Pierre
Richard’s The Imaginary Universe of Mallarmé.

It is obvious – and this will later receive further confi rmation

• that the fact that we have chosen to focus on the ‘blank’ and
  the ‘fold’ is not an accident. This is both because of the specifi c
  eff ects of these two elements in Mallarmé’s text and precisely
  because they have systematically been recognized as themes by
  modern criticism. Now, if we can begin to see that the ‘blank’
  and the ‘fold’ cannot in fact be mastered as themes or as mean-
  ings, if it is within the folds and the blankness of a certain
  hymen that the very textuality of the text is re-marked, then we