324 Derrida 1963–1983
and jealousy. When he was in a manic phase, Louis could be
very mordant, even if he often disguised his aggression as irony.
‘I’ve seen the greatest living philosopher,’ he would tell us. It
was all a matter of his tone of voice.^48Other worries plagued Derrida at this time. On 8 August 1980,
shortly after the end of the Cerisy conference, Jacques Brunschwig,
a professor at Nanterre and the cousin of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, sent
him an embarrassed letter. The recent thesis defence had admittedly
removed one obstacle, but new diffi culties had arisen. To begin with,
Paul Ricoeur’s post had been suppressed. When a new post was
created, one of his colleagues, annoyed that the job seemed to have
been reserved for Derrida, decided that he would apply. Brunschwig
explained, uncomfortably, that the atmosphere at Nanterre had
deteriorated over the past few months: ‘Unfortunately I am far from
being able to announce to you the unanimous election, without any
hitches or off -stage plotting, that you might have expected.’ He sug-
gested that Derrida ask for further advice before announcing that
he was applying.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse. Derrida’s
hesitations irritated several of the professors at Nanterre, who had
the impression that he was playing hard to get. According to his old
classmate Alain Pons – by now Professor of Political Philosophy at
Nanterre, but not part of the group responsible for overseeing the
succession to Ricoeur –, Derrida’s failure was largely the result of
petty meanness: it was feared that Derrida might be a nuisance, and
people were jealous of his celebrity. But one should not underesti-
mate the pressure brought to bear by the Minister for Universities,
the extremely reactionary Alice Saunier-Séité: having had the build-
ings at Vincennes razed to the ground,* she barred the path of the
man who had founded the Greph and set up the Estates General
of philosophy. Now, in order to obtain the post of professor at
Nanterre, Derrida still had to jump through one institutional hoop:
he had to be auditioned by the CSCU, the Conseil Supérieur des
Corps Universitaires. This was to remain one of his worst memories.
Dominique Lecourt, who was turned down the same day,
remembers the scene vividly.
- After the destruction of Vincennes and its move to Saint-Denis, the Minister had
stated: ‘What do they have to complain about? Their new buildings will be located
between the rue de la Liberté, the avenue Lénine and the avenue Stalingrad, and
they’ll be surrounded by the local Communists’ (remarks quoted by Claude-Marie
Vadrot, ‘Quand Vincennes déménage à Saint-Denis’, Politis no. 30, April 2008,
p. 32).