Severed Ties 1972–1973 235
to write a brief letter of homage during one of his brief stays in Paris.
Treating Derrida as a pure writer, Genet quoted the fi rst lines of
‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ before stating:
For us, this opening is as celebrated as the fi rst page of [Proust’s]
Young Girls in Flower, just as new, and yet torn from our own
selves by Jacques Derrida, who makes it his own and now
makes it ours. It will be ours more and more, and less and less
his. [.. .] The fi rst sentence is alone. It is totally alone. But let
us read lightly, with a nimbleness that is, if possible, as subtle
as Derrida’s, simply, guided by the playfulness of the words,
as the full sense of the sentence trembles sweetly and bears it
on towards the next. The usual, coarse dynamism that leads a
sentence to the next seems in Derrida to have been replaced by
a very subtle magnetism, found not in the words, but beneath
them, almost under the page.^14So for Genet, it was important to ‘read [lire] gently. Laugh [rire]
gently as the words make their unexpected entrance. Accept above
all what is off ered to us with good grace: poetry. Then the
meaning will be handed to us, in reward, and very simply, as in a
garden.’ Coming from a writer for whom Derrida had the greatest
admiration, this eloquent homage cannot have failed to touch him.
It was also in the form of a short letter to Jean Ristat that Roland
Barthes intervened, while saying he was sorry not to be able to ‘col-
laborate fully’ in the issue. The lack of time was probably not the
only reason for this. Barthes was very close to Sollers and in a very
delicate situation at this time when everyone was being forced to
take sides. Nevertheless, in the few lines he wrote, admiration and
gratitude are expressed with clarity and force:
I belong to another generation than Derrida and probably his
readers; so Derrida’s work has had its impact on me, in the
middle of life, of work; the semiological enterprise was already
fully formed in me and partly achieved, but it risked staying
imprisoned, enthralled by the phantasm of its scientifi city:
Derrida was one of those who helped me to understand what
was at issue (philosophically, ideologically) in my own work:
he knocked the structure off balance, he opened up the sign: for
us, he is the one who unpicked the end of the chain. His literary
interventions (on Artaud, on Mallarmé, on Bataille) have been
decisive, and by that I mean: irreversible. We are indebted to
him for new words, active words (and in this respect his writing
is violent, poetic) and a sort of incessant deterioration of our
intellectual comfort (the state in which we feel too comfortable
about what we think). Finally, there is in his work something