From Husserl to Artaud 1963–1964 137
the same questioning. This is why it is of great importance to
my life that, after reading you, I have met you and that we have
talked together.^31Derrida’s most important article from this period was the one
that he devoted to Emmanuel Levinas. It was the fi rst substantial
study of this philosopher, born in Lithuania in 1906 and thus fi fty-
eight when the article came out. He had been a friend of Blanchot
since the 1920s, a friend of Husserl and then Heidegger, a prisoner
in Germany throughout the Second World War. In 1947, he pub-
lished his fi rst major work, Existence and Existents. Since then, he
had regularly taken part in teaching at the Collège Philosophique,
while running the teacher training school of the Alliance Israélite
Universelle. His thesis, Totality and Infi nity, was published in 1961,
in a somewhat small print run, by Martinus Nijhoff at The Hague.
It was thanks to Paul Ricoeur that Derrida discovered the work
straightaway, as he reminded him in a late letter:
I remember a day which I imagine you have forgotten (it was
in 1961 or 1962, I was at the time your assistant in general
philosophy at the Sorbonne), when we were walking together
in your garden. You had just read Totality and Infi nity, before
a dissertation viva – I think you were one of the examiners.
I had still not read it and knew only Levinas’s ‘classic’ – and
extraordinary – works on Husserl, Heidegger, etc. The follow-
ing summer, I in turn read Totality and Infi nity and started to
write one long article, then another – and his thought has never
since left me.^32Derrida took advantage of the relative tranquillity of summer
1963 to write his article ‘Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the
thought of Emmanuel Levinas’. But as he typed it out, he soon real-
ized that it was ‘long, much too long’.^33 Michel Deguy confi rmed
this when acknowledging receipt of the text: ‘You’ve written a whole
book!! With the system of notes that you use, it all adds up to a
hundred or so pages!’^34 Either Derrida should agree to reduce his
study to some thirty pages or so, with Deguy’s help if required, or
he should seek a publisher to turn it into a fully fl edged book. But
this second solution would probably be diffi cult to bring off , given
the fact that Levinas was at the time little known.
At the beginning of December, Deguy returned to the attack, and
adopted a rather fi rmer tone: ‘What would you say if I proposed
[.. .] cutting up and butchering your article? Would you suff er
intensely to see it amputated, shrunken like a Bushman’s head, at
the careful hands of someone else?’^35 Then it was Jean Piel who
asked Derrida to try to revise his article, since it seemed to him