Derrida: A Biography

188 Derrida 1963–1983

time that my temporary cothurne realized that he had left his

pyjamas behind – but not, fortunately his portable typewriter.

The typewriter made up for the lack of pyjamas, so he asked me

whether the noise of him working would bother me. Of course,

my reply was conciliatory, so he spent a good part of his night,

and mine, [.. .] typing, I suppose for some other future confer-

ence, a paper whose tenor I might have been able to infer, if

my ear had been more absolute and better trained, from the

acoustically diff erentiated sonority of his typewriter keys.^5

It is not going too far to deduce that the pages Derrida was so
hastily typing were those of the paper on ‘La diff érance’ that he gave
the next day, on Saturday, 27 January, at 4.30 p.m., in the amphi-
théâtre Michelet in the Sorbonne. For the fi rst time, he had been
invited to present his work to the Société Française de Philosophie,
a somewhat intimidating assembly from which, unfortunately,
two of his allies were missing: Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice de
Gandillac – they were both examiners at a thesis viva.
The opening of this text was to remain celebrated:

I will speak, therefore, of a letter.

Of the fi rst letter, if the alphabet, and most of the speculations

which have ventured into it, are to be believed.

I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which

it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there,

into the writing of the word diff erence; and to do so in the

course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within

writing whose diff erent trajectories thereby fi nd themselves, at

certain very determined points, interacting with a kind of gross

spelling mistake [.. .].

Therefore, preliminarily, let me recall that this discreet

graphic intervention, which neither primarily nor simply aims

to shock the reader or the grammarian, came to be formulated

in the course of a written investigation of a question about

writing. Now it happens, I would say in eff ect, that this graphic

diff erence (a instead of e), this marked diff erence between

two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains

purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard.^6

In the discussion that followed this paper, which was both a
recapitulation and a new foundation, the fi rst reaction – that of
Jean Wahl – was rather positive. But it was followed by an irritated
reaction on the part of Brice Parain, who compared this diff érance,
which is ‘the source of everything’ and which ‘cannot be grasped’,
to negative theology. Derrida totally denied this. Then Jeanne
Hirsch, a traditional humanist, criticized ‘a certain contemporary