314 Derrida 1963–1983
philosophy by philosophers... But what happens when, all of
a sudden, Jacques Derrida decides to tackle literature mano a
mano and give birth to a love story where we were expecting a
theoretical treatise?^20Even though the press was positive, there were far fewer reviews
than for Derrida’s previous works. It must be said that, since the
beginning of 1980, there had increasingly been signs of change in
France. On 5 January, Lacan signed the letter dissolving the École
Freudienne de Paris before retiring into silence; he passed away on
9 September 1981. Roland Barthes suff ered an accident from which
he never recovered, and died on 26 March 1980. On 15 April, it was
Sartre’s turn; fi fty thousand people followed his funeral procession,
probably sensing how much was being buried with him. In fact,
the ideological climate was changing rapidly. Marxism had been
fragile since the mid-1970s, and now gave way to an equally arro-
gant ‘liberalism’. The publishing world, too, was being transformed.
Diffi cult works were less fashionable than ever, and several of the
intellectually more demanding series ceased publication.
One revelatory symptom of the new Zeitgeist was the creation,
at Gallimard, of the review Le Débat. Pierre Nora, who had played
a key role in the rise of structuralism, clearly wanted to turn over a
new leaf. In the opening declaration, ‘What can intellectuals do?’, he
gave the impression he was attacking the authors of his own series,
the ‘Bibliothèque des sciences humaines’ and the ‘Bibliothèque des
histoires’, starting with Michel Foucault. In issue 3 of the review,
under the title ‘Human rights are not a policy’, Marcel Gauchet,
the editor in chief chosen by Nora, laid into Lacan and Derrida
with considerable vehemence. The coarsest aspects of the nouveaux
philosophes seemed to have found their epigones. Now nothing
stopped those who wanted to denounce the ‘master thinkers’:
Beyond the fi eld of political notions, we will need to show
clearly how the innumerable versions of anti-humanism that
have been developed are part of, or connive with, the mental
universe of totalitarianism. Two examples: Lacan’s denuncia-
tion of the subjective lure [leurre] swept away by the chain of
signifi ers, and Derrida’s vision of writing as the process of
diff erence in which the identity of the proper is dissolved.^21In academia, one interesting possibility seemed to be within reach. At
Nanterre, Paul Ricoeur had found 1968 and its sequels very diffi cult
to cope with – he had even had a dustbin emptied on his head.^22 At the
end of the 1970s, after several heart scares, he decided to stop teaching
at Nanterre as well as the phenomenology seminar he ran in the rue