Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 225
The ‘new academic year’ did indeed start in a highly radical-
ized atmosphere. At Tel Quel, the pressure of the Maoists was
increasing. In June 1971, Sollers got Seuil to publish Daily Life
in Revolutionary China, the extremely enthusiastic piece of report-
age brought back by a friend of Althusser’s, Maria Antonietta
Macciocchi. This book made Derrida feel uneasy, and he asked
his old friend Lucien Bianco what he thought of it. The author
of Origins of the Chinese Revolution made no attempts to conceal
his exasperation at this clumsy piece of propaganda for a
Cultural Revolution whose bloody brutality was often ignored by
Europeans. As Derrida put it in a late text, his friendship with
Bianco had very soon put him on his guard against ‘the obscu-
rantist terror that was waxing so eloquent in certain quarters’,
especially ‘at a time when the most alarming, the most threat-
ening, and sometimes too, the most comic dogmatic slumbers
dominated the stage of a certain Parisian “culture” ’.^51 For now,
he avoided the subject as best he could. In spite of the harden-
ing of political positions, dialogue with Sollers remained very
friendly, as with Kristeva, who had just offi cially come onto the
review’s editorial board. Dissemination was in production and
it seemed self-evident that Derrida would take part in the con-
ference ‘Artaud/Bataille’ that Tel Quel was organizing for the
following summer in Cerisy.
All the same, as in 1968, it was a relief to set out for the United
States. The Derridas travelled by ship, in the middle of August,
since Derrida had still not overcome his phobia of fl ying. Jacques
and Marguerite were accompanied by their two sons, and also by
their niece, Martine Meskel – Janine’s daughter – who had just
taken her French baccalaureate in Nice. ‘During my childhood,’ she
remembered,
Jackie was in some ways my ‘American uncle’ [my exotic ben-
efactor]. His travels to distant parts made me dream. In July
1971, as I was impatiently awaiting the results of my French
baccalaureate, he told me: ‘I’d love to take you to the United
States, but you realize it depends on the marks you get in the
bac.’ In actual fact, he already had the results in his pocket and
they were good... A few weeks later, we embarked together on
the steamer France. I remember that Jacques pointed out the
distance between the luxury of the ship and the poverty of
the American Blacks whom he supported in their struggles.
On the crossing, I felt immersed in an intellectual atmosphere
that was quite new for me. Marguerite made me read a few
works by Freud, and Jacques a few dialogues by Plato. The fol-
lowing year, I immediately got good marks in philosophy, and
that helped me decide what I wanted to study.^52