134 Derrida 1963–1983
questions of such contemporary importance that he would be very
happy to publish it in Critique. But he was dismayed by its length
- some forty pages; perhaps it would be better to cut it into two.
Derrida was not thrilled by this idea, and Piel fi nally decided to
publish ‘Force and signifi cation’ in one go, in the June–July double
issue.
The conditional phrase with which the article opens is towering,
majestic, and melancholy at once: ‘If it recedes one day, leaving
behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the
structural invasion might become a question for the historian of
ideas.’^23 Structuralism would peak publicly in France only three or
four years later, but for the young Derrida it was no longer anything
more than a hangover from the past, a survival.
The tone of ‘Force and signifi cation’ comes from who knows
where – perhaps from Maurice Blanchot? With the loftiness of its
views, the diversity of its reference points – Leibniz and Artaud,
Hegel and Mallarmé –, this text seems to have landed from nowhere,
but it manifests a style of thought and writing which Derrida’s
readers must have felt they would need to take seriously. Even
though the article was a positive review of Jean Rousset’s book,
it undermined its basic presuppositions, dealing a series of deadly
blows to what Derrida cruelly called ‘the worst exhilaration of the
most nuanced structural formalism’. ‘In the rereading to which we
are invited by Rousset, light is menaced from within by that which
also metaphysically menaces every structuralism: the possibility of
concealing meaning through the very act of uncovering it.’^24 To
paraphrase the celebrated words of Malraux, what we here witness
is the wild intrusion of philosophical concepts into literary criticism.
This long article, which, four years later, would be the opening essay
in Writing and Diff erence, perhaps comprises the founding act of
what would soon be known as cultural studies.
In 1963, Derrida seemed tirelessly productive. Having made his
name as an excellent Husserl specialist, he was turning into an
important fi gure on the Parisian intellectual scene, someone to
reckon with. Shortly after the birth of his fi rst son Pierre, on 10
April, he threw himself into writing a new article for Critique, a
shorter text on a recent work published by Gallimard: The Book
of Questions by Edmond Jabès. The writer, whom Derrida did not
yet know personally, had been born in Cairo in 1912, in a French-
speaking Jewish family; as a Jew, he had been forced to leave Egypt
in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. A fi rst collection of poems, I Build
My Dwelling, published in 1959, was simultaneously hailed by
Supervielle, Bachelard, and Camus. The Book of Questions was the
fi rst instalment of a cycle of books that would run to seven volumes.
The article ‘Edmond Jabès and the question of the book’ bears