A Period of Withdrawal 1968 191
already in a state of great unrest was mainly important for the start
of his relationships with Peter Szondi, the founder of the Institute of
Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and one of the most
respected contemporary professors, even among student protesters.
The son of the great psychiatrist Leopold Szondi, Peter Szondi was
born in Budapest in 1929, into a Jewish family. In 1944, the whole
family was deported to Bergen-Belsen, before benefi ting from a
bargain made with the Nazis and sent to Switzerland in the ‘Kastner
train’.^12 Peter Szondi remained traumatized by survivor’s guilt for
the rest of his life, as did his great friend Paul Celan. It was thanks
to Szondi that Derrida make the acquaintance of this major poet –
whose path he had sometimes crossed in the rue d’Ulm since 1964:
It so happens that Celan was a colleague of mine at the École
Normale Supérieure for many years without me knowing him,
without us really meeting. He was the German lector. He was
a very discreet, very self-eff acing, inconspicuous man. In fact,
one day, in the offi ce of the Director of the École, there was a
discussion of various administrative matters and the Director
himself said something that suggested he didn’t know who
Celan was. My Germanist colleague spoke up: ‘But, Monsieur
le Director, do you know that we have here as lector the great-
est poet in the German language?’ This shows the Director’s
ignorance, but also the fact that Celan’s presence was, like
his whole being, like all he did, extremely discreet, elliptical,
self-eff acing. This explains why for a few years, when I was his
colleague, we did not get to know each other.^13When Szondi in turn came to Paris, he fi nally introduced Celan
to Derrida and the two men exchanged a few words. A few meetings
ensued, always brief and practically silent: ‘The silence was his as
well as mine. We would exchange signed copies of our books, a few
words, and then disappear.’ Celan was no more voluble at a lunch
with Derrida at the home of Jabès and his wife: ‘He had, I think, a
rather grim experience when it came to his relationships with many
French people.’ It needs to be remembered that, at the time, there
were hardly any translations of Celan. And even though Derrida
knew enough German to work closely on philosophical texts,
Celan’s language remained for him at this time enigmatic, more or
less inaccessible. He would take many years to read him properly.
It was in somewhat strange circumstances that Derrida got to know
another writer who had fascinated him since his teens, Maurice
Blanchot.
It all started with a volume of homage to Jean Beaufret, The
Endurance of Thinking, which his old pupil François Fédier had