286 Derrida 1963–1983
In his comments on 11 January, Lacan made a sideswipe at
another great friend of Jacques and Marguerite Derrida, René
Major, even if he did not name him, merely mentioning ‘the spread
of [his] teaching to that something that is at the other extreme of
analytic groups, which is that thing that goes around under the
name Institut de Psychanalyse’.^54 Major had been the director of
this institute since 1974.
Major, born in 1932 in Montreal, arrived in Paris in 1960 and
met Jacques and Marguerite Derrida thanks to Nicolas Abraham.
In 1966, he was an enthused member of the audience when Derrida
gave his paper ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, and started to read
Derrida’s works methodically. Derrida very soon told him: ‘They’ll
make you pay very dearly for the interest you’re showing in my
work, I can promise you that.’^55 Within the French psychoanalytic
movement, Major soon occupied an original position. In 1973,
together with his friend Dominique Geahchan, he set up a working
group that, the following year, took the name ‘Confrontations’, and
met with considerable success. Major was also in charge of a series
published by the Aubier-Montaigne imprint, and it was Derrida
who suggested the title: ‘Psychoanalysis Taken at Its Word’ (‘La
psychanalyse prise au mot’).^56
Throughout the late 1970s, ‘Confrontations’ strove to tear down
the walls between the groups and societies that were confronting
one another on the French psychoanalytical scene. As Élisabeth
Roudinesco explains, the seminar organized by Major at the Institut
de Psychanalyse, in the rue Saint-Jacques, was ‘an open space in
which representatives of diff erent varieties of Freudianism came to
speak of their dramas, confl icts, and works without having to initi-
ate a split’.^57 But the debate was not just an internal one: Major also
invited personalities from the intellectual scene such as Clément,
Kristeva, Baudrillard, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe.
It was in this context that, on 21 November 1977, ‘Confrontations’
welcomed the author of Glas and ‘The factor of truth’. This memor-
able session – which would constitute the last part of the book The
Post Card – was prepared with great care, almost like a theatri-
cal script. The audience was fl abbergasted by Derrida’s power of
improvisation, even though in fact it was all written out, including
Major’s remarks. Extending the dialogue from a distance which
had set them at loggerheads for over ten years, Derrida seemed to
address Lacan directly, trying, as it were, to outdo him verbally. Far
from sticking to the position of a philosopher outside this milieu
and its quarrels, he made no attempt to conceal how redoubtably
well informed he was. He would later defi ne himself as ‘a friend of
psychoanalysis’, but he here waxed ironical over the idea of the ‘slice
of analysis’ and the division ‘into four slices’ of the world of French
psychoanalysis: