140 Derrida 1963–1983
I immediately want – after a fi rst reading – to thank you for
sending me your texts, with their dedications, for all the trouble
you have taken to read me, comment on me and refute me so
vigorously. [.. .] I must tell you of my great admiration for
the intellectual power deployed in these pages, so generous
even when they are ironic and severe. Heartfelt thanks for
everything.^42‘Violence and metaphysics’ also won Derrida his fi rst letter from
Maurice Blanchot, a close friend of Levinas since the 1920s. He had
already read Derrida’s previous articles with considerable interest,
but this time he made sure he told him ‘how helpful’ this work was
for him and how he would be ‘happy to continue to take part in the
movement of [his] refl ections’.^43 This was the start of an essential
friendship that lasted for nearly forty years.
In 1964, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Sollers became acquainted.
Even though he was six years younger than Derrida, Sollers had
been an important fi gure since the publication of his fi rst novel,
A Strange Solitude. In 1958, the work was hailed by Mauriac
and Aragon, shortly before Sollers founded the review Tel Quel
with Jean-Edern Hallier. In 1961, he won the Prix Médicis for
The Park, his second novel, and resolutely embarked on a series
of modernist experiments. He had recently become greatly inter-
ested in philosophy. When The Origin of Geometry came out, he
was immersed in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. So, on reading
Derrida’s Introduction, Sollers was very struck by the parallel
between Husserl and Joyce; he devoted a short note to the work
in the thirteenth issue of Tel Quel, in spring 1963. Derrida was
touched, and sent him off prints of ‘Force and signifi cation’ and
‘Cogito and the history of madness’.
The tone of Sollers’ fi rst letter, on 10 February 1964, was
extremely warm; he told Derrida that the two texts had been of the
highest interest to him, even if his ‘philosophical incompetence’
made it necessary for him to proceed intuitively in the debate with
Foucault. ‘It is striking to note, in any case, that once again –
and this is no coincidence – thought and “literature” (when both
authentic) can communicate radically with one another. This sort of
mutual questioning is very revelatory, isn’t it?’^44
At the same time, Gérard Genette, who had just been appointed
assistant at the Sorbonne and had already published in Tel Quel,
invited the Derridas to a ‘a dinner of clever clogs with Sollers and
perhaps Barthes’ on 2 March 1964, in his apartment in Savigny-sur-
Orge, in Seine-et-Oise. Sollers and Derrida met up again in June,
this time at Michel Deguy’s. The two men immediately hit it off , and
Sollers was soon asking Derrida for an article for Tel Quel, on the