From Husserl to Artaud 1963–1964 139
Ever since the fi rst weeks of 1964, Derrida had been attending
Levinas’s Tuesday evening classes at the Sorbonne and regularly
going up to talk to him at the end. Derrida hoped to use the few
months remaining before the publication of his immensely long
article to prepare the author of Totality and Infi nity for its appear-
ance. For while the study was overall very fl attering, it also made
several critical points. Levinas had sent Derrida a signed off print of
his new text, The Trace of the Other, and Derrida began by sending
him his previous articles, addressing him in timid and cautious
terms:
I have long hesitated – even after they had been published – to
send you these ‘dead leaves’... Mainly because they did not
deserve it, but also because I was anxious not to oblige you, very
indiscreetly, to talk or write to me about them. Having to decide
whether or not to send out off prints, and whether it is friendlier
to do so or to abstain, always makes me very unhappy.
Then we talked about Jabès, and then I thought that what
I occasionally try to say in these pages is sometimes linked, in
another way, with what I ventured in the text you will soon
read in the R[evue] de M[étaphysique]... So I have made so
bold as to send you these three occasional texts, really ‘occa-
sional’ [de circonstances], if we can suppose that there really are
‘occasions’ [circonstances] in this case... Anyway, by all that
they have led me to say or announce, I feel, as always (and as I
did the other evening when, on parting, we uttered the names of
Hegel or É. Weil) as close to your thought and as far from it as
it is possible to be; which is contradictory only in terms of what
you call ‘formal logic’.40*In October 1964, Derrida immediately sent the fi rst part of the
published article to Levinas; he enclosed the manuscript version
of the rest, asking Levinas to excuse the state it was in: ‘When you
see it, you’ll understand the hatred I can sometimes inspire in the
secretaries of reviews, printers, etc.’ With a mixture of confi dence
and apprehension, he awaited Levinas’s reaction to those ‘reckless
pages’.^41 The author of Totality and Infi nity replied frankly:
- It is interesting to note that, though Levinas and Derrida got to know each other
at the Sorbonne in January or February 1964, contact between them could have
been established shortly afterwards by a quite diff erent means. On 19 June 1964,
Jacques Lazarus, of the French Section of the World Jewish Congress, wrote to
Aimé Derrida that he had had an opportunity to talk to M. Levinas, ‘a specialist in
the philosophy of Husserl’: ‘I told him that your son, Professor Derrida, had written
a work upon that philosopher. M. Levinas would be very happy to get in touch with
him and I would be most obliged to you if you would be so kind as to give me his
address.’