Severed Ties 1972–1973 245
Likewise, though Derrida declared that he was rather shocked by
the publication, in 2001, of the correspondence between Paul Celan
and his wife Gisèle, this was not because he was hostile in principle,
but because he deemed that such an edition might be misleading
without other love letters being published also, notably those to
Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilana Shmueli.^37
Sylviane Agacinski, the grand-daughter of a Polish miner who had
come to France in 1922, was born in 1945, and grew up in Lyon. As
a pupil at the Lycée Juliette-Récamier, she studied drama, as did
Sophie, her elder sister, who went into the theatre professionally
and married the actor and humorist Jean-Marc Thibault. Sylviane
studied in the Faculty of lettres at Lyon, where she attended the lec-
tures of Gilles Deleuze, among others. She moved to Paris in 1967,
worked freelance for Paris-Match for a year, and actively partici-
pated in the events of May 1968. ‘Breathtakingly beautiful’ in the
opinion of many of those who knew her at the time, she would like
to have become an actor. But she eventually resumed her studies,
and was taught by Heinz Wismann, among others. She came top in
the written exam for the CAPES in philosophy, passed the agréga-
tion, and taught in Saint-Omer and Soissons, and then in the Lycée
Carnot in Paris, in the classes préparatoires for the École des Hautes
Études Commerciales.
Sylviane attended Derrida’s seminar at the École Normale
Supérieure from 1970, with her then boyfriend, the writer Jean-Noël
Vuarnet, and started an aff air with Jacques in March 1972, during
a conference organized in Lille by Heinz Wismann. She broke off
with Vuarnet before the décade at Cerisy and the atmosphere was
very tense. Derrida started his paper with a few sentences fi lled with
double meanings:
From Basel in seventy two (The Birth of Tragedy) Nietzsche
writes to Malvida von Meysenbug.
From this, Nietzsche’s letter, I shall snip out the bits and
pieces of an erratic exergue: ‘... At last my little bundle (or
the little envelope (pli): mein Bündelchen für Sie. Will it ever
be revealed, what was thus named between them? ) is ready
for you, and at last you hear from me again, after it must have
seemed I had sunk into a dead silence (Grabesschweigen)... we
could have celebrated a reunion like that of the Council of Basel
(Basler Konzil), which I recall with warm memories... .’^38This was the fi rst of the coded messages that Jacques and Sylviane
were to exchange so often, from one book to another, up to at least
The Post Card.
As at many of the Cerisy conferences, at least in those days, there