Severed Ties 1972–1973 253
own image, complicated enough that the force of desire is at the
same time checked, contradicted, thwarted.^57Nonetheless, the issue was fi nally published, with an Escher print
on the cover: a procession of little alligators who escape from a sheet
of paper before returning to it. In the introductory text, ‘The wild
one’, Clément analysed what, in her view, constituted ‘Derrida’s
deviance’:
He is not in his place, not like the others, he is wild. A philo-
sopher? Yes, by profession, since he teaches philosophy; more
a writer, perhaps. An academic? Yes, no doubt, since he is a
maître-assistant at the ENS; but exiled into a sphere of activity
that he is subjecting to a powerful critique. [.. .] The material
of philosophy has no privilege for him, no more than any other:
‘literature’, ‘theatre’; and the uncertain fi eld of texts whose
status is indeterminate (narrative? biography? song? poem?)
are places in which the words of the language can be worked
over. Now, the method of deconstruction is always coming
close to fi ction. [.. .] This issue of L’Arc, in an ideal perspec-
tive, demands to be read as a collective fi ction of which Derrida
would be the title, the pre-text.^58Standing out from this collection of essays was the contribution
by Emmanuel Levinas, entitled ‘Quite otherwise’. The author of
Time and the Other began by hailing the importance of ‘these texts,
exceptionally precise and yet so strange’ published by Derrida,
and wondered whether his work cuts across ‘the development of
Western thought with a line of demarcation, like Kantianism,
which separated dogmatic philosophy from criticism’. He could
hardly have been more fl attering. Except that, characterizing the
work of deconstruction, Levinas then went on to propose a terrible,
ambiguous image:
To begin with, everything is in place, after a few pages or a few
lines, as the result of a redoubtable questioning, nothing is left
in which thought can dwell. Over and above the philosophical
implications of the propositions, this is a purely literary eff ect,
the new frisson, the poetry of Derrida. Whenever I read him,
I again see the exodus of 1940. As it retreats, the military unit
arrives in a locality which still suspects nothing, where the cafés
are open, where the ladies are shopping in the ‘novelties for
ladies’ section, where the hairdressers are hairdressing hair,
the bakers are bakering, the viscounts meeting up with other
viscounts and telling one another stories about viscounts, and
where everything is deconstructed and desolate an hour later,