A Lucky Year 1967 179
they had been written by Spinoza, Descartes or Kant? Frankly,
I don’t think that what I write is worth so much fuss, especially
Tristes Tropiques, in which I didn’t claim to be setting out any
truths, merely the daydreams of an ethnographer in the fi eld –
I’d be the last to say there is any coherence in them.
So I can’t avoid the impression that, by dissecting these
clouds, M. Derrida is handling the excluded middle with all the
delicacy of a bear. [.. .] In short, I’m surprised that minds as
agile as yours, supposing they have deigned to read the pages of
my books, didn’t ask themselves why I make such a casual use
of philosophy, instead of rebuking me for so doing.^32But Lévi-Strauss occupied only one chapter of the book. The
crucial section of the second part of Of Grammatology was devoted
to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially the Essay on the Origin
of Languages, a short and at the time almost forgotten work
that Derrida boldly linked to certain passages of the Confessions.
Contrasting works of a very diff erent level and style, attentive to
their least details, Derrida proposed a new type of reading, which
might be likened to the free-fl oating attention of psychoanalytical
listening. Following the traces of the word ‘supplement’, often asso-
ciated with the adjective ‘dangerous’, Derrida showed how Rousseau
linked it sometimes to writing and sometimes to masturbation, for
both of which he showed a fascinated mistrust.
Reading of the kind Derrida practises ‘must always aim at a
certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he
commands and what he does not command of the schemata of the
language that he uses’.^33 It is a ‘signifying structure that reading
must produce’, even when the work pretends to eff ace itself behind
the signifi ed contents that it transmits. At the polar opposite of the
academic tradition, the discourse of philosophy or of the human
sciences is approached as a text in the full sense of the word.
The publication of Of Grammatology more than confi rmed the
interest aroused by the double article in Critique. On 31 October, in
La Quinzaine littéraire, François Châtelet reviewed it, devoting an
enthusiastic full page to it under the title ‘Death of the book?’ On
18 November, Jean Lacroix, in charge of the philosophical coverage
in Le Monde since 1944, devoted an entire article to Derrida, half a
page long. The fi rst lines were a real accolade:
Philosophy is in crisis. This crisis is also a renewal. In France,
a whole constellation of (relatively) young thinkers are trans-
forming it: Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, etc. We now need
to add to these names that of Jacques Derrida. Known to a
small group of enthusiastic normaliens, he has just revealed