Severed Ties 1972–1973 247
on Lacan and publish it as a short book rather than a long article,
promising to recommend this project to Delorme. He himself
was fi nishing off a text on Condillac that was going to be used as
the preface to the latter’s Essay on Human Knowledge and would
eventually become The Archaeology of the Frivolous. But he was
feeling tired and doing things ‘slowly and unenthusiastically’. ‘The
Condillac is, if I may say so, a routine piece of work,’ he explained
to Roger Laporte.^42
Work was interrupted by the correction of the proofs of two
books that were coming out with Éditions de Minuit in the autumn:
Margins of Philosophy and Positions. On his own admission, Derrida
was a poor proof-corrector and this tedious task cast even more of
a shadow over the weeks he spent in Nice in the little apartment on
the rue Parmentier. In the letter he sent to Michel Deguy, he made
no attempt to disguise his bad mood, but he did conceal from his
old friend the factor that must have greatly contributed to it: the
impossibility of seeing Sylviane:
Never have holidays been so burdened down, wiped out,
poisoned by ‘families’. The discomfort and promiscuity, the
overcrowding are such that writing a postcard requires consid-
erable ingenuity. You can imagine the rest. Another fortnight’s
irritation and nervous exhaustion. A terrible mess – for us, at
any rate, and for what we might be doing with our time; the
children are radiant.^43Just like 1967, the year 1972 meant for Derrida the publication
of three new works: after Dissemination – published in spring by
Éditions du Seuil in conditions rendered diffi cult by the quarrel
with Tel Quel –, Margins of Philosophy and Positions came out
with Éditions de Minuit in the autumn. In La Quinzaine littéraire,
Derrida tried to explain to Lucette Finas, to whom he was very close
at the time, the links between the two main volumes, insisting that
there was no break between them:
Apparently, of course, Dissemination is mainly concerned with
so-called ‘literary’ texts: but it is also an attempt to question the
‘taking-place’ – or not – of the literary. Apparently, of course,
Margins of Philosophy deals with or encounters, hails within
view of, philosophy. These are often discourses of provocation,
and in any case have been received as such – lectures given to
solemn university audiences, sometimes swathed in Frenchness
(Collège de France, Société Française de Philosophie, Société
de Philosophie de Langue Française) or not. [.. .] So these
two books are not bound together by any peaceable, academic
linking of literature with philosophy, revised and corrected