A Period of Withdrawal 1968 205
it was indeed the autumn – the end of certain type of membership in
the university.’^59
Hyppolite’s death did indeed appear as a symptom and a symbol.
As Vincennes mobilized energies, the old Sorbonne was on the
retreat, especially in philosophy. After the retirement of Henri
Gouhier, Jean Guitton, and Jean Grenier, nobody could see how
their chairs would be fi lled, what would happen to the lectures, and
who would draw up the syllabus and the schedule. According to
Maurice de Gandillac, ‘the old professors reacted to the events [of
’68] in such diff erent ways that their collaboration is very diffi cult.
Almost none of them is immune from protests.’^60
A few weeks later, Gandillac, who hoped to obtain ‘a sort of sab-
batical year’, sent Derrida a moving letter that gives a good idea of
the atmosphere. He asked him to forgive the ‘anxieties’ which the
other members of the examining jury and he himself had ‘clumsily’
expressed at the viva the year before, especially since there had been
analogous diffi culties with Deleuze. Gandillac realized that the
events of May had ‘sounded the death knell [glas] for a certain type
of ceremonious relationship’. ‘It is you, now, who are a master – a
diffi cult master. As for us, panting after the movement and eager to
carry on learning, it is sometimes hard to adapt. Forgive us, as our
hearts are in the right place.’^61
But if the old masters were all at sea, Derrida himself and many
of the professors of his generation were almost as disoriented.
Teaching in the United States – or in Tunisia, in the case of Foucault
and Barthes – gave them a provisional refuge from an almost
intolerable French academic situation – one that was at all events
incompatible with the serious work Derrida hoped to accomplish.
Jean-Claude Pariente, who was teaching in Clermont-Ferrand but
had come to Normale Sup to give a seminar on Rousseau, could
understand the weariness of his old comrade as he returned to ‘this
world that’s pretty broken down’. ‘Here, we’re exhausted by all the
commissions, meetings, discussions... Yes, we set and marked the
exams and started teaching again at the end of November, but it
needed a constant presence and a permanent state of alert.’^62
As in the previous year, the Derrida family went to Gstaad, to the
Bauchau home, for the Christmas vacation. Once again, it was an
opportunity for long conversations. With real clairvoyance, Henry
Bauchau encouraged the author of ‘Plato’s pharmacy’ to launch
out on a more literary form of writing, as a letter from a short while
later confi rms:
I wonder whether you have started to write outside philosophy
and yet with ‘all your bags and baggage’, as you put it so well.
I reckon that’s where you’ll end up, there’s a part of you that