Nouveaux Philosophes to Estates General 1977–1979 301
Obs, from Playboy to Le Monde, from France-Culture to TF1,
Antenne 2, France 3 – not to mention other, more surprising
and closer media? [.. .] All these phenomena, despite their lack
of ‘philosophical’ interest, nonetheless interest me greatly, very
indirectly. And they at least deserve a long, complex analysis
that discusses pretty much everything and goes quite some way
back in time.^5Even though, at bottom his position was not very diff erent from
Deleuze’s, Derrida disagreed with the strategy of the latter’s short
pamphlet. But he remarked to Daniel Giovannangeli – who wrote
the fi rst thesis on Derrida’s work at the University of Liège – that
the discourse of the nouveaux philosophes made him feel like writing
something about Marx, though he added that he would not do so,
since this would mean giving them a surplus value which they did
not deserve.^6 A few months earlier, he had stated in an interview in
Digraphe:
You know to what extent I have remained unmoved in the face
of various episodes of ‘Marxist’ or pseudo-Marxist dogmatic
eruptions, even when they were attempting to be terroristic or
intimidating, and sometimes very close to places I was passing
through; well, I fi nd even more ludicrous and reactive the hasti-
ness of those who today think they have fi nally landed on the
continent of post-Marxism. They are sometimes one and the
same, but who would be surprised by that? You are aware
of the new Parisian consensus and all the interests that are
knotted together by it.7*- The relations between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Derrida were much more fraught
and ambiguous than they might seem. In an article in Le Magazine littéraire in
May 1974 (well before Barbarism with a Human Face had made him famous),
Lévy stated that Derrida was ‘not a guru’, and attacked Derrida’s disciples rather
than the master himself: ‘There are Derrideans, and yet there is no such thing as
Derrideanism. Jacques Derrida has disciples, and he is not a maître à penser. This is
perhaps the main ambiguity of his texts, the key to their hermeticism and their leg-
endary diffi culty. Derrideans? They constitute, as it were, our new femmes savantes.
A strange race of philosophers who gravitate around the rue d’Ulm and the reviews
of the avant-garde. They speak the language of the master and mimic his least little
tics. They write “diff erence” with an a and read Greek in the original. They go to
seminars in the same way that others go to mass or to market: to seek the last rites
or the latest trendy concept. Today it’s “hymen”, yesterday it was “pharmakon”, the
day before yesterday “the arch-trace”. You don’t quite understand? They tell you
in reply that there’s nothing to understand: these aren’t “concepts”, but “textual
work”.’ However, according to Lévy, the real issues involved in Derridean decon-
struction were political: ‘They touch on the most sensitive point of our theoretical
situation: the destiny and status of Marxism. Everyone is talking of going beyond
Marxism: Derrida is perhaps the fi rst to outfl ank it.’ Some twenty years before
Derrida’s Specters of Marx, this is quite an insightful remark. And Lévy concluded: