Derrida: A Biography

Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 383

he underlined its interest and its importance before regretting the
fact that Derrida never moved on from a ‘conceptual statement’ to
a ‘moral insurrection’. But the conclusion was, all of a sudden, more
brutal:

Let’s say things in crude and simple terms: Derrida’s analysis is

indeed subtle and acute [.. .], but, when it comes to analysing

Heidegger’s ‘utterance’, which was aimed not just at settling

a point of doctrine or illuminating a concept, but at giving a

philosophical determination of Nazism, why make such a fuss?

Why hold such unclear ethical or political positions? Why does

Heidegger’s work keep one at a distance, as the sword does its

victim?^8

Derrida was deeply hurt, by the subheadings that divided up
the article and seemed to summarize it – ‘without ever criticizing a
thing’, ‘not much moral insurrection’ – and especially by the word
‘fuss [chichis]’. Today, Maggiori agrees:

He was taken aback by that over-familiar word. If I’d written

‘precautions’ or ‘sophistication’, he’d probably have found it

easier to accept. He sent me a brutal letter just after the article

came out, and didn’t speak to me for four or fi ve years. His sen-

sitivity was particularly great because Libération mattered to

him and I was one of the few journalists to write probing arti-

cles on works of philosophy. But the press is always inclined to

simplify matters, even if only in the headlines and subheadings,

for which I am far from being the main person responsible.

These were things he never accepted.^9

A week later, it was the turn of Le Monde to react. Roger-Pol
Droit devoted a long article to Derrida’s two books, for once more
clement than the one in Libération. He emphasized the books
themselves, rather than the polemic launched by Farías and Jambet:

Famous and unknown, [Derrida] makes disconcerting moves,

sidling along the walls between philosophy and literature, dis-

mounting the proper, the name, the word – and the book too,

with the result that many people can’t, as you say, follow. And

yet! What inventiveness there is, clear, incisive, even joyful,

in the styles of the volume [Psyche] that is being published at

the same time as Of Spirit! [.. .] What if Derrida were to be

discovered in France?^10

The boil had not yet been completely lanced, however. When the
review Le Débat devoted a bulky issue to ‘Heidegger, philosophy