Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 217
had in hypokhâgne in Le Mans, before being Gérard Granel’s
student in Bordeaux. Coming across Of Grammatology from
diff erent angles, we’d both been excited by it. Derrida repre-
sented living philosophy for us: there was somebody doing
philosophy right in front of our eyes, producing concepts that
we would have to work with. Derrida had provided the missing
link in the chain from Hegel to Heidegger; he enabled me to
read Husserl. Braun was afraid I might leave for Nanterre,
where Ricoeur wanted me to be his assistant. He intuitively
realized that if he brought Philippe and me together, he’d
be able to keep both of us... May 1968 was a time of great
upheaval in Strasbourg. There were many debates and a great
desire for radical positions. We were very distrustful of the
Communist Party, vaguely attracted to Maoism, but even more
fascinated by Situationism – Philippe especially.^27At the beginning of 1970, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe invited
Derrida to take part in a seminar on rhetoric, within the context of
the newly established ‘Groupe de recherches sur les théories du signe
et du texte’ (‘Research Group on Theories of the Sign and the Text’).
Gérard Genette and Jean-François Lyotard also attended. The
paper which Derrida proposed, with the title ‘The white mythology’,
was a fragment taken from his seminar at Normale Sup:
It’ll be about the status of metaphor in the text of philoso-
phy, aimed at bringing out the ‘metaphysical’ traits of the
concept of metaphor that may guide and thereby neutralize
this problematic. [.. .] The pretext, if not the guiding thread,
of this analysis will be a passage from The Garden of Epicurus
by Anatole France (yes!). The real guiding thread goes from
Nietzsche to Heidegger.^28Derrida went to Strasbourg for the fi rst time on 8 and 9 March
- This meeting, in many ways a milestone, was recounted in
detail by Lacoue-Labarthe in an eloquent homage improvised
shortly after Derrida’s death:
He was one of our fi rst three guests in the little ‘research group’
that Jean-Luc and I had managed to set up, after ’68. What
struck me – three things, unforgettable: the infi nite sadness of
his gaze, as he came out of the station with Genette and before
he saw Jean-Luc and myself, who had gone to pick him up; it
was the gaze of Kafka in the photos, of Celan too (and indeed,
his fi rst words were to tell us of the death of Celan, which he
had just heard about). His incredible mastery, then, in his paper
‘White mythology’, which left me stunned, fl oored, stammering,