Derrida: A Biography

In Support of Philosophy 1973–1976 279

‘exercises’: writing on this, and then on that. To think together

meant bringing to light what I wanted to do: this meant going

via Nietzsche and the discussion of African philo sophy. I still

live my philosophical life with that advice in mind.^30

On the editorial level, things had soon turned sour. Relations with
Galilée had completely failed to live up to their promises. In March
1975, Michel Delorme turned down Mimesis, mainly with the excuse
that there was a ‘publishing crisis’ of which Glas had just been one of
the victims.^31 Derrida had hoped to change publishing practices; he
was profoundly disappointed.
For several months, Jos Joliet, a former student of Derrida’s who
worked for Flammarion, acted as an intermediary. In April, the
teams of ‘La philosophie en eff et’ and of the review Digraphe joined
the publishing house in the rue Racine. Even though the series was
still run by the team as a whole, Henri Flammarion insisted that
Derrida look after ‘the technical side’, a rather heavy responsibility
for which he had neither any real competence nor any particular
liking.
After these tumultuous months, Derrida spent the beginning of
summer 1975 writing Signéponge, a lecture that would take up a
whole day at the Francis Ponge colloquium in Cerisy, at the start
of August,. This text was essentially about the role of the signature,
as if it were making Ponge’s whole oeuvre derive from ‘the chance
of his name’; it paid almost mimetic homage to a poet he had liked
since his teens. The fi rst lines were an address rather than an incipit:

FRANCIS PONGE – from here I call him, for greeting and

praise, for renown, I should say, or renaming.

Much would depend on the tone I want understood. A

tone is decisive, and who shall decide if it is, or is not, part of

discourse?

But then he is already called Francis Ponge. He will not have

waited for me to be called himself.

As for renown or renaming, that is his thing.^32

As often, alas, the rest of the summer did not bring Derrida the
respite he had hoped for. After some exasperating and expensive
problems with his car that put him in a bad mood, the family
sojourn in Menton was not very successful, as the apartment rented
by his mother turned out to be ‘uncomfortable and noisy, barely tol-
erable’.^33 However, he needed to prepare his classes for the autumn,
while writing ‘Pas’, a long dialogue on Blanchot, in which a ‘mani-
festly masculine’ voice was confronted with another voice, ‘rather
feminine’.