Severed Ties 1972–1973 251
has been quite long-lasting and friendly: I am particularly keen not
to give my departure the appearance of a betrayal.’ Even though
Derrida insisted on the risk of excessive dispersal of his eff orts and
his increasing fatigue, it was evident that the malaise had other
reasons behind it:
I particularly need, in order to pursue or gather together what I
am trying to do myself, to take up more distance and freedom,
in particular to withdraw, as far as possible, from a Parisian
scene from which I feel more estranged than ever. [.. .] It is
probably an illusion, but I would like to provoke (in myself), at
least superfi cially, a certain renewal...^53At Piel’s request, Derrida agreed to join the review’s committee
of honour, a wider circle that did not involve anything concrete:
‘In that way it will be impossible to interpret my withdrawal as
a breaking off , and I am grateful to you for allowing me to mark
this so clearly.’ Piel had asked Derrida to tell him, ‘in all frankness
and friendship’, what concrete reasons lay behind his distance, but
Derrida assured him that there were none. Anything he might add
would not be any more concrete; ‘anecdotal, perhaps’, but it was
from the anecdotal scene more than anything that he increasingly
wished to withdraw.^54
On the Parisian scene, however, he was far from being invisible.
At the start of summer 1973, Le Monde devoted a double spread
to ‘Jacques Derrida, the deconstructor’, with a caricature by the
cartoonist Tim, who presented him as an Egyptian scribe with an
impressive head of hair. Lucette Finas, who had organized this
presentation, insisted that ‘Derrida has, overall, been given a much
warmer welcome abroad than he has in France.’ Most of his works
had been translated into a dozen languages, she claimed, exaggerat-
ing a little, before explaining briefl y, and as informatively as possible,
concepts such as trace, diff érance, supplement, pharmakon, hymen,
and so on.
In the same issue, Christian Delacampagne, an ex-normalien who
was now a regular collaborator on Le Monde, attempted to defi ne
deconstruction. Since ‘metaphysics as a whole, in other words our
culture as a whole’, should be considered as a text, deconstruction
was, fi rst and foremost, an act of reading. To deconstruct ‘is not to
demolish, to beat naïvely against a fortress with one’s fi sts. Since the
middle of the nineteenth century, the death of philosophy has been
on the agenda, but the sentence is diffi cult to carry out: the death of
philosophy must be philosophical.’
Strangely enough, Philippe Sollers also contributed to his
homage, in a way far removed from the attacks that had appeared
in the Bulletin du mouvement de juin 1971. Derrida’s contribution to