340 Derrida 1963–1983
Strangely, what I saw in front of my eyes was your handwriting,
straightaway.
Never mind, here we are in a real novel, with the Pope, drugs,
police, Embassies – and the rest.
Hello Poe! Of course!
Happy New Year – very best wishes as well as to Marguerite
(I have been thinking a lot of all of you).^15Derrida’s reply, on a postcard showing the old Jewish cemetery in
Prague, showed how sore the wound still was:
Thank you, thank you for your letter. What you say goes
straight to my heart.
So that’s what it will have needed (prison and the rest!).
Never mind, your gesture is just like what I’d liked in our
friendship, over nearly ten years, already ten years ago...
You must know it, but I have to, or prefer to, say it: it’s
through rigorous loyalty to that past friendship that, when
confronted with the worst things (aggression, insults, demean-
ing denigration, etc.), I have kept silent, a silence to which, of
course, I now return. After your letter, this silence will perhaps
have a diff erent taste for me, and it’s this in particular for which
I want to thank you. Yours.^16Derrida would go no further and would ostentatiously turn away
from Sollers when the latter came up to him at some reception or
other. This break was, for him, fi nal.
The same was not true of Michel Foucault, who had spoken on
radio as soon as he heard of Derrida’s arrest to demand his lib-
eration. The two men resumed contact, initially at a distance. But
some time later, when Foucault invited Jacques and Marguerite
Derrida to an evening at his home, at the request of an American
professor who was dropping by at the Collège de France, Derrida
was greatly touched by the quality of his welcome. Foucault’s pre-
mature death, on 25 June 1984, did not give them time to become
really close again. But it was with real generosity that Derrida
returned to Foucault’s work in 1991, on the occasion of the thir-
tieth anniversary of Madness and Civilization, when he began by
referring to their former friendship, then ‘this shadow that made
[them] invisible to one another, that made [them] not associate with
one another for nearly ten years ’, claiming that this ‘stormy discus-
sion’ was itself part of a history that he loved ‘like life itself’ and like
all his past.^17
In Czechoslovakia, the Derrida aff air had a signifi cant and highly
positive impact for the image of France. The activities of the Jan