Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 389
If I have not written this so directly before now, no more
than I have replied to so many of the errors in Distinction that
would have fully deserved it, this was not so as to avoid having
to face troublesome texts, but by a refl ex (no doubt old fash-
ioned and out of date, or even too ‘distinguished’) of loyalty or
reticence in wounded friendship. It is true, I often prefer silence
[.. .]. Now I am freed from my reserve, thanks to this latest
aggression.As for the end of the letter, it is quite clearly a case of denegation:
One word more: the debate on Heidegger has never placed me
in ‘a very diffi cult situation’, as Bourdieu claims in a gesture
whose rhetoric strikes me as coming from a kind of electoral
sociology; and my serenity has never been aff ected by it. For,
after all, I am to some extent involved – and not only by my
last book – in provoking and complicating the said debate. For
a long time already, and even recently. Those who sometimes
look at my work will know this well.This page of Libération is completed by a short, sober summing up
by Bourdieu. Embarrassed by the proportions that the confl ict was
assuming, he said that he regretted that ‘certain unhappily chosen
words’ in his interview had hurt Derrida. And while he deplored the
‘prophetic anathemas’ which the author of Of Spirit had just used,
he preferred, in the name of their ‘old friendship’, not to infl ame
things any further. In fact, the two men would soon overcome their
diff erences, and join forces in several combats throughout the 1990s.
The basic quarrel between them, however, reappeared in Sketch
for a Self-Analysis, a posthumously published text by Bourdieu,
in which there are several digs at Derrida. In the very fi rst pages,
Bourdieu points out that, in his youth, he had been a student at
Normale Sup, specializing in philosophy, and thus ‘at the summit of
the scholastic hierarchy, at a time when philosophy could appear as
triumphant’. It was then ‘the queen of disciplines’, he insists, before
acknowledging: ‘I have often had occasion to defi ne myself, with
some irony, as the leader of a liberation movement of the social
sciences against the imperialism of philosophy.’^23
Coming at exactly the same time as the Heidegger aff air, the de Man
aff air was a real blow for Derrida, since it encouraged facile com-
parisons. But while the debate on Heidegger was essentially French,
the polemic on de Man mainly concerned the United States.
However, it all started in Belgium, with the research carried out
by a young Flemish scholar, Ortwin de Graef, who tells the story in
these words: