Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 213
appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, by Philippe Sollers;
it aroused considerable curiosity.^18 At the invitation of Alan
Montefi ore, whom he had met at Cerisy back in 1959, Derrida went
to Balliol College in February and May 1970. ‘I brought him over
partly out of a spirit of contrariness,’ recalls Montefi ore.
His work and that of other French philosophers was looked
down on in Great Britain. I was swimming against this current,
publishing regular reviews of what was coming out in France in
Philosophy. But for my students, and even often for me, Derrida’s
works were still very diffi cult to get a handle on. I’d asked him
to let those taking part in these encounters speak before he did,
so they could ask him about what they didn’t understand. In
discussions of this kind, he was remarkably clear.^19In France, this period was marked by several polemics, these days
largely diffi cult to get excited by. Now that the Communist Party
has lost most of its prestige and infl uence, it is not easy to realize
how important it was straight after 1968, at a time when many
young intellectuals decided to join the Party so as to ward off pres-
sure from the extreme Left. Antoine Casanova, who was at the
time the editor in chief of La Nouvelle Critique and, since 1970, a
member of the Central Committee, acknowledges that, these days, it
is almost impossible to understand the ‘advances, limits, blindspots,
and diffi culties in escaping from previous frameworks of thought,
action, and argument’ that then preoccupied the Communists.^20 Far
from being monolithic, the Party was home to several intellectual
tendencies, which sometimes clashed over somewhat strange issues.
On 12 September 1969, L’Humanité published a long article by
Jean-Pierre Faye with the title ‘Comrade Mallarmé’. Even though
Sollers and Tel Quel were his main targets, Faye was implicitly
attacking Derrida. He vigorously protested against the idea that
the whole history of the West was founded on the ‘ “debasing” of
writing, its repression at the hands of speech’. In his view, certain
people had even managed ‘to identify, quite seriously, speech to the
bourgeoisie and writing to the proletariat’. Faye went even further
than this caricature.* With his cryptic references to Heidegger and
- In 1967, in his interview with Les Lettres françaises, Derrida reacted angrily to
this reading. Never, he assured readers, had it been for him a question of rehabili-
tating writing against speech or protesting against the voice. The main thing, in his
view, was to analyse the history of a hierarchy and not in the least to oppose ‘a
graphocentrism to a logocentrism, [n]or, in general, any center to any other center’
(Positions, p. 10). It is far from clear that Derrida’s more enthusiastic commentators
have always shown the same caution.