178 Derrida 1963–1983
what is called thinking and a certain interplay of signs, marks or
traces’.^28
In the eyes of several philosophers, Speech and Phenomena is one
of Derrida’s major works. Georges Canguilhem and Élisabeth de
Fontenay expressed their admiration to him on their fi rst reading.
The great Belgian phenomenologist Jacques Taminiaux has also
professed a passion for this work, placing it on the same level as
Levinas’s Totality and Infi nity. And Jean-Luc Nancy considers it
even today as one of the peaks of Derrida’s oeuvre:
Speech and Phenomena remains in my view the most magiste-
rial and in many respects the most exciting of his books, since
it contains the heart of his whole operation: moving away from
self-presence; and diff érance with an ‘a’ in its diffi cult relation
between infi nite and fi nite. For me this is really the heart, the
driving force, the energy of his thinking.^29Of Derrida’s three 1967 works, however, it was Of Grammatology
that was to remain the most famous. In particular, it was through
this work that he thought he would start to make a name for
himself in the United States. On Derrida’s own admission, the
book is, however, composed of ‘two heterogeneous passages put
together somewhat artifi cially’.^30 The fi rst part, ‘Writing before the
letter’, was an enlarged version of the article published in Critique:
it was here that the fundamental concepts were put in place. The
second, ‘Nature, culture, writing’, began with an analysis as patient
as it was implacable of a chapter in Tristes Tropiques, with ‘The
writing lesson’ showing the stratagems used by the author to link
the appearance of violence among the Nambikwara with that of
writing.
Subjecting Lévi-Strauss’s ethnological discourse to critique just
after questioning Saussure’s linguistics was a deliberate move on
Derrida’s part. They were the two pillars of structuralist discourse,
a discourse which Derrida judged to be at the time dominant in the
fi eld of Western thought, but which was in his view trapped ‘by an
entire layer, sometimes the most fecund, of its stratifi cation, in the
metaphysics – logocentrism – which at the same time one claims
rather precipitately to have “gone beyond”.’^31
Lévi-Strauss made no attempt to conceal his irritation. Shortly
after the fi rst publication of this chapter in the fourth issue of the
Cahiers pour l’analyse, he sent a caustic letter to the review’s editors:
Do I need to tell you how grateful I was for the interest shown
me in your recent publication? And yet I can’t shake off an
awkward feeling: aren’t you playing a philosophical farce by
scrutinizing my texts with a care that would be more justifi ed if