242 Derrida 1963–1983
These cantankerous remarks were fairly obviously not just theoreti-
cal; they were also aimed at Foucault, a long-standing friend and
ally of Deleuze. Derrida was convinced that ‘a sort of unbroken,
homogenous front, involving “Change – Tel Quel – Deleuze –
Foucault” ’ was being drawn up, and this front appeared worrying
to him, in several respects. ‘As they’d like to give credence to the
idea that all they have to confront is the French Communist Party
(with which, as you know, I have no truck whatsoever, and which
deep down mistrusts “us”, no doubt correctly) you can imagine the
eff ect of isolation this has, of being “hunted down”.’^30
As the irony of the calendar would have it, the Nietzsche confer-
ence, held in Cerisy from 10 to 20 July 1972, came straight after
another celebrated décade, in which Derrida had also been sched-
uled to speak: the one which Tel Quel dedicated to ‘Artaud/Bataille’,
enrolled under the banner of the Cultural Revolution. The partici-
pants might almost have met. The sessions on ‘Nietzsche, Today?’,
led by the strange couple Maurice de Gandillac and Bernard
Pautrat, gave rise to several stormy scenes. A number of groups
were present: the ancients and the moderns, but also the Deleuzians
and the Derrideans. At the opening session, Pautrat candidly set out
the issues facing the assembled listeners: ‘We all know more or less
what to expect from a conference such as “Nietzsche, Today?” [.. .]
Everybody has already had his or her say on Nietzsche, and there’s
no possible compromise between all these desires.’
Relations between the participants remained generally muted,
but there were still several theoretical confrontations. One member
of the audience asked Deleuze ‘how he expects to manage without
deconstruction’; the latter replied, courteously but fi rmly, that this
‘method’, even though he ‘admire[d] it’, had nothing to do with his
own.
I really don’t set myself up as a commentator on texts. A text,
for me, is simply a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It’s
not about commenting on the text by a method of deconstruc-
tion, or a method of textual practice, or other methods, it’s
about seeing what use it is in the extra-textual practice that
extends the text.^31This was not far removed from the criticism that Michel Foucault
had expressed a few months earlier, in more clearly radical terms.
Derrida also remembered seeing Jean-François Lyotard writing in
the room. ‘ “You’re working up to the last minute,” I said to him.
And he replied, with a smile, “I’m sharpening my weapons”, and the
friend-foe was clearly identifi able.’^32 This period just after 1968 was
no longer a time for commenting on the texts of the tradition (even
in a new way), but one for changing the world.