182 Derrida 1963–1983
and type of analysis. He gave a class every week, a class that was
simultaneously philosophical and literary, showing complex
and contradictory relationships, both internal and external,
between literature and philosophy. I was overwhelmed, we
were all overwhelmed, by Derrida’s style, by his way of reading,
of asking questions, of analysing texts. Everything was up for
questioning, everything was up for discussion, and in a diff er-
ent way. And in order to do this, it was especially necessary to
fi nd another voice, another style, another writing. Nothing was
the same as before.^43Gérard Granel did not simply congratulate the former boarder at
Louis-le-Grand for ‘all these births, books and a child pell-mell!’^44
While Derrida, now the only reader who counted in his view,
immersed himself in his still unpublished thesis on The Meaning of
Time and Perception in E. Husserl, Granel was writing for Critique
a detailed review of the three recent volumes, ‘Jacques Derrida and
the erasure of origin’.
In these twenty pages, he hailed the arrival of a profoundly new
kind of writing. He was probably the fi rst to use the adjective ‘der-
ridien’ in French. The opening lines cannot fail to have touched his
former classmate: ‘Already a whole work – but one that is not at all
a “work”; already a whole style of writing, in one year unfurled over
our heads like a banner. A beautiful sight in the sky and bright in
its new colours.’^45 But while singing the praises of Derrida and his
‘strategy’, which manages to remain ‘respectful and kind’, Granel
does not draw back from showing rather more malice towards
Levinas – he does not see how Levinas could ‘wriggle out of the
net that Derrida has tightened round him’ – and especially towards
Foucault:
An implacable patience, a fearsome gentleness, are also evident
in the ‘few remarks’ that Foucault brings down on himself
for the treatment he metes out to Descartes in the History of
Madness. This is perhaps where we can see most clearly how
a ‘particular point’, initially lost in the middle of the work,
enables us to penetrate gradually, and then all at once, into this
work even when it is already open, its implications laid bare.
Indeed, all we need to do thereafter is to transport (not even
to transpose) the now evident inadequacies of the History of
Madness into The Order of Things for the essentially undefi ned
notion of archaeology underlying the whole enterprise to fall
apart.^46Foucault, who had hitherto encouraged Derrida ‘with his warm
friendship’, wanted Derrida to oppose, if not the publication of the