224 Derrida 1963–1983
marking, ‘in all the essays’ he had published, ‘a departure from the
Heideggerean problematic’.^46
The next day, Houdebine thanked Derrida warmly for his patience
in replying to all their questions. But a few days later, when he
informed Sollers about the interview, he described ‘a position more
defensive than off ensive’, a great number of ‘precautions’, and much
‘prudence’.^47 Things were far from over. On 1 July, Houdebine sent
Derrida the transcript of the interview, together with a letter of
markedly Leninist inspiration, part of which would be published as
an appendix to the interview. Derrida, for his part, did not merely
review his remarks with minute attention; he added a very long note,
extremely vigorous in tone, on Lacan – another subject.
In the texts that I have published so far, the absence of refer-
ences to Lacan, in eff ect, is almost total. This is justifi ed not
only by the aggressions in the form of, or with the aim of,
reappropriation that Lacan, since the appearance of De la
grammatologie in Critique (1968) (and even earlier, I am told),
has proliferated, whether directly or indirectly, in private
or in public, in his seminars, and from 1965 on, as I was to
notice myself reading them, in almost each of his writings.
[.. .] This constriction of discourse – which I regret – was not
insignifi cant, and, here too, called for silent listening.^48When Derrida had written his fi rst articles, he stated, he had
known only two or three of Lacan’s texts, even though he was
already ‘assured of the importance of this problematic in the fi eld
of psychoanalysis’. Ever since, on reading the Écrits closely, he had
discovered several of the main themes that he was himself endeav-
ouring to question: ‘a telos of “full speech” in its essential tie [.. .]
to Truth’, and ‘a light-hearted reference to the authority of phono-
logy, and more precisely to Saussurean linguistics’, together with
an absence of any specifi c probing of the ‘question of writing’. He
announced that he had been greatly interested by the ‘Seminar on
The Purloined Letter’ and would soon be coming back to it.^49 This
he did in November 1971, in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University,
probably the same as that also given at Yale.
On 30 July, Houdebine said he had received the revised and
enlarged interview. The whole piece comprised, in his view, ‘an
important text, a series of highly productive markers in the ideologi-
cal fi eld of the new academic year’; he had no doubt that it would
‘have quite an impact’.^50 Derrida insisted that the text not be shown
to anyone before publication, scheduled for November. This did
not stop Houdebine from describing the contents of the interview
- including the note on Lacan – when he met up with Sollers and
Kristeva on the Île de Ré.