252 Derrida 1963–1983
literature was, in his view, ‘of absolutely decisive importance: with
“grammatology”, a new relationship between literary practice and
philosophy has been founded’. Derrida had formulated a question
which philosophy had always failed to ask itself, one that aimed
at transforming the very status of literature. While Sollers made
no direct mention of the previous years’ quarrel, he nonetheless
expressed a few reservations, in a somewhat paternalistic tone:
The crisis, the sheer excess produced by Derrida, may be pro-
ductive, but only if he in his turn is not encircled by academic
utilization. For we need to distinguish between the considera-
ble work accomplished by Derrida and the ‘Derrideanism’ that
has developed at breakneck pace. [.. .] I think that he himself
will need to overcome the way his discourse may become
reassuring.^55The review L’Arc, meanwhile, wished to devote a complete issue
to Derrida. Catherine Clément submitted a list of contributors in
which there were more writers than philosophers in the traditional
sense: Hélène Cixous, François Laruelle, Claude Ollier, Roger
Laporte, Edmond Jabès, and so on. This did not stop Derrida
from abruptly rejecting the transcription of the interview that he
had given Clément: he said he had neither the time nor the strength
to reduce those sixty pages to the required form and dimensions,
especially since he was far from satisfi ed by what he had improvised.
‘The few interviews in which I have taken part have always left me,
more or less depending on the case, discontented (with myself, of
course).’^56
Risking sabotaging the whole project, Derrida refused with equal
vigour to have any photo of him to appear in the review, even less
on the cover, as had been the practice in all previous issues of L’Arc.
He later explained this intransigence to Didier Cahen, in the radio
programme ‘Le bon plaisir’:
During the fi fteen or twenty years in which I tried – it was not
always easy to do with publishers, newspapers, etc. – to forbid
photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank,
absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the
code that dominates at once the production of these images,
the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications
(showing the writer’s head framed in front of his bookshelves,
the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, fi rst of all, terribly
boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to
work on. So it seemed to me consistent not to give in to all this
without some defence. This vigilance is probably not the whole
story. It is likely that I have a rather complicated relation to my