Severed Ties 1972–1973 241
He also invited them on several occasions to Normale Sup,
together or separately, to speak on the subject of their choice.
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe suggested a seminar on Lacan, an
idea which Derrida welcomed. ‘After the interview in Promesse, this
might have looked like something of a conspiracy,’ Nancy admits.
But in actual fact, we wanted to read Lacan properly, for our
own benefi t fi rst and foremost, and then for our Strasbourg
students. Our work consisted for the main in focusing line by
line on ‘The instance of the letter’, one of the major texts in the
Écrits. Initially we couldn’t understand much of it. Gradually,
we worked out what came from Hegel, from Bataille, and from
Heidegger.^26At this period, Derrida dreamed of forcing the École to evolve.
For instance, he thought of recruiting a few normaliens outside of
the usual system of competitive exams, and based simply on their
real abilities. He also wished to foster interdisciplinary research
and open up a real forum for research, but at every point he came
up against the conservatism of the institution. The new Director,
Jean Bousquet, invited him, rather maliciously, to go back to teach-
ing the Latin of Descartes. Derrida was off ended, and asked Jean
Bollack and Heinz Wismann to set up a seminar to study Greek
philosophical texts from a new point of view. Having started his
study of classical Greek belatedly, Derrida never stopped trying to
deepen his approach to the language and thought of Greece, and
was particularly scrupulous in the way he quoted the texts.
In March 1972, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was published
by Éditions de Minuit, in the ‘Critique’ series, and was hugely suc-
cessful. On the stylistic level, its diff erence from Derrida’s earlier
works was evident, with its famous opening: ‘It is at work every-
where, functioning smoothly at times, at others in fi ts and starts. It
breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.’ From the theoretical
point of view, as Vincent Descombes noted, while Deleuze seemed
to have ‘succeeded in the Freudo-Marxist synthesis where everyone
else had tried in vain, it was because he adopted an irreverent style
which meant, in the end, that his synthesis was neither Freudian nor
Marxist’.^27
Derrida reacted with irritation and hostility. At a dinner with
Gérard Granel, he went so far as to attack the bestseller so viol-
ently that Granel abandoned the discussion.^28 In Derrida’s words,
Anti-Oedipus was a ‘very bad book (confused, full of contorted dis-
claimers, etc.) but an important symptomatic event, to judge from
the demand to which it is clearly meant to supply and the way it has
been welcomed by a very broad and dubious sector of opinion’.^29