220 Derrida 1963–1983
really glad to see has attained independence, and, basically,
is functioning okay, but also bogged down in dreadful prob-
lems (unemployment, over-population, etc.) that are visible
at fi rst glance; a university full to bursting (18,000 students)
but without any political liberty (the student union has been
dissolved, there’s very strict ideological control, the right of
assembly and putting up political posters forbidden, etc.). Then
the discomfort with the children, rain almost all the time. So we
came back home earlier than expected.^36This did not stop Derrida from falling prey to violent attacks of
‘nostalgeria’ over the following years. In letters to his friend Pierre
Foucher, who had long been teaching in Algeria, he said how much
‘this whole buried past still worked on [him] silently but power-
fully’.^37 ‘I sometimes have fi ts of nostalgia so strong I could fall over
backwards in a faint. I’m hardly exaggerating. As soon as I get the
opportunity (time, money), I’ll go and spend a few days there.’^38
Like several of his contemporaries, Gérard Granel had been in a
state of deep intellectual crisis ever since May 1968. Before then he
had seemed to take little interest in politics; now he put it foremost
among his preoccupations. He sent Derrida the texts he had recently
published and asked him questions on several points, beginning
with ‘the enigma of his silence on Marx’.^39 Admittedly, he was not
the fi rst to do so, but he was the only one to whom Derrida bothered
to reply at such length, and so frankly. ‘If I’d seen where the “main
thing” is, in Marx and in everything that’s at issue in his name, if I’d
managed to read this whole fi eld in a way that was not regressive in
comparison with what “I” am attempting elsewhere [.. .], I’d have
had my say on Marx,’ he wrote to Granel.^40
Of course, he explained, some people thought that you need to
express an opinion on everything. For instance, he had just been
asked to take part in an interview on atheism, for a volume in which
Jean Rostand, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edgar Morin, and François
Jacob would also hold forth on the subject, but he ‘of course’ told
the purported interviewer of his ‘defi nite silence’ on the matter.
Likewise he turned down a radio programme on Blanchot, even
though the latter was one of the authors who counted most for him.*
- The letter of refusal which Derrida sent to the Belgian radio and television
authorities was completely characteristic of his attitude to the media at that time. He
mistrusted the lot of them, even those that were the most attentive to and respect-
ful of his work. ‘You may know how greatly I am convinced of the signifi cance
of the thought of Maurice Blanchot – whose true importance has not yet been
appreciated – and how much it counts for me. This is the main reason for which it
seems to me diffi cult to “talk” about it in a radio interview, to “decide what I think”