410 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
knowledge about the questions put to them and the most
elementary familiarity with the given problems, they do not
understand what is being asked of them, and in any case do not
have the theoretical tools to answer.^20However moderate these proposals were, they aroused fi erce
debate. A petition opposing the report was signed by one thousand
two hundred people. On 18 October 1990, a particularly stormy
session was held in the amphithéâtre Poincaré, rue Descartes. The
teachers present fought against the contents of the report, but
also against Derrida himself, with often highly aggressive attacks.
Catherine Malabou remembers some diffi cult moments.
The Société Française de Philosophie and the Association
Française des Professeurs de Philosophie were the biggest
detractors of the project, which fi nally led to its being shelved.
Jacques knew that he had many enemies in the Inspection
Génerale, but he couldn’t understand why philosophy teach-
ers were refusing to envisage philosophy being extended to the
classes of the seconde and première. Like a trades union offi cial
abandoned by his base, he was fi ghting on behalf of people who
gave him absolutely no support. After this report, he felt sick
and absolutely refused to ever get involved in this kind of thing
again.^21Jacques Bouveresse emerged from the venture feeling just as crest-
fallen. ‘On the content, I continue to think that our proposals were
perfectly reasonable. Shortly before his death, Derrida said, in a
television broadcast, that one had to resign oneself to admitting
that the corporation of philosophy teachers was, in fact, profoundly
reactionary. I can easily imagine what it must have cost him to say
this.’^22
Just as stressful was another crisis that had erupted a few months
earlier, during preparations for the conference on ‘Lacan with the
Philosophers’ scheduled to take place at Unesco in May 1990,
on the initiative of the Collège International de Philosophie. The
polemic, launched by Alain Badiou, concerned the place occupied
by Derrida in the wake of Lacan. In his letter to René Major on 12
December 1989, Badiou asked him to change the title announced for
his paper: ‘Since Lacan: Is there a Derridean psychoanalysis?’ The
presence of Derrida’s name in the title of a paper, when he was ‘the
only living philosopher to be mentioned anywhere in the entire con-
ference’, struck him as being likely to ‘saturate the signifi cance’ of
all their work.^23 Major and Derrida were appalled by this demand,
which seemed to them a form of censorship.