128 Derrida 1963–1983
Apart from Paul Ricoeur and Tran-Duc-Thao, Derrida barely
refers to contemporary philosophers. One can sense an urge to go
straight to Husserl’s text, bypassing the offi cial interpreters. Sartre is
never quoted, and when Derrida mentions Merleau-Ponty, he does
nothing to hide the fact that he is ‘tempted by an interpretation dia-
metrically opposed to that of Merleau-Ponty’.* In the very middle
of his Introduction, however, Derrida develops an unexpected
parallel between Edmund Husserl’s endeavour and that of James
Joyce. Over several pages, he contrasts ‘the univocity investigated
by Husserl and the equivocation generalized by Joyce’. The former
seeks ‘to reduce or impoverish empirical language methodically to
the point where its univocal and translatable elements are actually
transparent’, while the latter puts to work a writing that brings out
‘the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and interwoven
intentions within each linguistic atom’, a writing that ‘circulates
through all languages at once, accumulates their energies, actual-
izes their most secret consonances’.^4 This strange parallel, quite
out of kilter with the rest of his commentary, seemed mainly to
bring Derrida the phenomenologist face to face with his own
double, haunted by literature and by a writing beyond all intention
[vouloir-dire].
In spite of the technical nature of this fi rst publication, Derrida
was far from abandoning more literary projects. Having attempted
several times to collaborate in literary reviews, he envisaged writing
a short book with Michel Monory, who, on his return from military
service, was teaching French in Orleans. Monory had written his
diplôme de lettres on ‘Gaspard de la nuit and the birth of the poem
in prose’. Derrida suggested that the two of them write a volume
on Aloysius Bertrand, the author of Gaspard, for the series ‘Poètes
d’aujourd’hui’, published by Seghers.^5 The idea would probably
- Strange as it might appear, Derrida had hardly any personal contact with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. He seems to have seen him only once, in 1950 or 1951, when the
author of Phenomenology of Perception was an oral examiner for the entrance
exams in philosophy to Normale Sup. According to Françoise Dastur, Derrida
also had a telephone conversation with Merleau-Ponty, around 1956 or 1957, as
he was embarking on the translation of The Origin of Geometry. During the four
years which Derrida spent at the rue d’Ulm, he never went to hear Merleau-Ponty
at the nearby Collège de France, where the latter taught from 1952 to his death in
May 1961. In 1959–60, while Derrida was in Le Mans, Merleau-Ponty devoted his
lectures to what he called ‘the unthought’ of Husserl, focusing mainly on The Origin
of Geometry (these Notes de cours sur ‘L’origine de la géométrie’ de Husserl were
published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1998). But Derrida’s and Merleau-
Ponty’s investigations developed in total independence from each other. In spite of
the violence of his attacks on Sartre, Derrida felt many more affi nities with the latter,
and had read much more of his work. He came back to Merleau-Ponty in Memoirs
of the Blind (1990) and above all in On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), but there
was always a highly critical tenor to his remarks.