210 Derrida 1963–1983
and drifted through the fl oor above, rousing frequent complaints. In
the eyes of the Director of the École, Lacan was simply a trendy lec-
turer and a thorough nuisance to boot. He had been seeking a pretext
to get rid of him for some time. As Dominique Lecourt remembers:
One morning in 1969, Robert Flacelière called me into his
offi ce, which was unusual, and told me: ‘M. Lecourt, you’re
a philosopher – I’ve noticed you’ve been attending Lacan’s
lectures on truth and I’d like to know what you think about
them... In your view, is it serious stuff? Personally, all that
business about the phallus, I fi nd it obscene... The reason
I’m asking you is that M. Derrida and M. Althusser tell me it’s
serious stuff .’ The scene was like something out of Ubu Roi. I
tried to argue a case, unaware that he’d already decided to send
Lacan packing. Flacelière found that this trendy, provoca-
tive approach had nothing in common with the École’s real
mission. But when he wanted to act out his resentment and kick
Lacan out, there was uproar.^10On 26 June 1969, Lacan made public the letter of exclusion that
‘Flatulencière’ had sent him: yet again, he felt he was being exiled
as a public enemy. Immediately after the end of the session, several
faithful listeners, including the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, Philippe
Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Antoinette Fouque, a major fi gure
in French feminism, improvised an occupation of the Director’s
offi ce. The situation rapidly turned nasty: Philippe Castellin – who
had already led the revolt against Jean Beaufret the previous year
- started smoking Flacelière’s cigars, and then slapped him on the
face.^11 Sollers merely appropriated a pile of headed notepaper,
which he jubilantly used over the following months. But the whole
aff air went beyond the merely anecdotal. ‘The question of Lacan
played a part in distancing me from Derrida,’ Sollers acknowledges.
‘Like Althusser, he was still in certain respects an institution man.
Both of them gave Lacan only lukewarm support, while at the time
he was in a dreadfully isolated position, abandoned by his daughter
Judith as well as by his son-in-law. It was in this period that I started
to draw closer to him.’^12
In the rue d’Ulm, the ‘maos’ had long been in the majority, at least
as far as the philosophers were concerned. Dominique Dhombres,
who entered the École in 1967, remembers that ‘it took just a year
for me to shift from Paul Ricoeur to Mao Zedong, then to working
in a factory, as was the custom’. Luckily for Derrida, several pupils
of more Heideggerean sensibilities arrived at Normale Sup at the
end of the 1960s: Emmanuel Martineau, Jean-Luc Marion, Rémi
Brague, Alain Renaut, and Jean-François Courtine, among others.