388 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
The counter-off ensive was scathing. The young English philo-
sopher Geoff rey Bennington, who was at the time staying with
Derrida, remembers seeing him being beside himself with anger that
morning when he came down for breakfast. ‘Derrida, completely
furious, showed me Bourdieu’s interview in Libération. Since I felt he
was reacting over-impulsively, I suggested that he wait a bit before
sending off his reply. “It’s too late for that, the fax has already gone,”
he retorted.’^21
Derrida’s riposte appeared the following week. For him, it was an
opportunity to sort out his relationships with his old classmate. The
whole business was far from seeming ‘funny’. Let me quote at length
this text, which has never been reprinted:
Of all the debatable (and edgy, so very edgy!) remarks made
by Bourdieu, I’ll simply quote the one that includes the most
fl agrant counter-truth. I say counter-truth as a way, no doubt,
of practising what Bourdieu would probably call a euphemiza-
tion. Yes, of course I knew Bourdieu’s text. And yes, indeed,
he had presented it in my seminar (actually a seminar of the
Greph, in which he was at the time very interested [.. .]). But
when Bourdieu dares to claim that he had ‘given an account of
it at (my) seminar without arousing the least objection’, this is
monumentally false, as some thirty or so participants can bear
witness. I was not alone in formulating certain objections – of
which there were many.^22Derrida took this opportunity to widen the combat and return, in
his own ‘edgy’ way, to older wounds:
I have always found Bourdieu’s analyses (and those he inspires)
inadequate, both in their philosophical axiomatic [.. .] and in
their implementation, in particular when they concern philo-
sophical texts, or more especially texts such as Heidegger’s.
It is not essential to be a ‘Heideggerean’ (who is?) or to rest
content with ‘Heideggerean conclusions’ to realize that the set of
concepts underpinning Bourdieu’s work are pre-Heideggerean.
It has never been put to the test of the ‘questions’ raised by
Heidegger. [.. .] And I have far from forgotten or neglected
Bourdieu’s text – in fact, it was also of him that I was thinking
when (for example) I said that we need to get beyond the contrast
between reading from an internal and reading from an external
standpoint. For I think that the two readings are, in Bourdieu,
juxtaposed, and pretty much equally inadequate. In fact, his
‘internal’ reading, if we could still distinguish it as such, seems
even more short-sighted than the other. And not only in the case
of Heidegger – this concerns French matters, closer to us.