Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 223
people might one day place such importance on the ‘literary
talent’ (which must also be acknowledged, of course, you’re
quite right, and it’s not you that I’m suspecting here – it should
also be used, I agree) of the ‘poet’ Jackson. And other similar
traps. Will we ever know who’s laying a trap for whom in this
scenario? [.. .] With the best will in the world, with the most
sincere moral indignation against what remains, of course,
intolerable and unacceptable, what people say they are trying
to free might then be imprisoned anew. A crime domesticated.^42Whether or not they were published, these concrete acts of soli-
darity were far from being suffi cient to meet people’s expectations.
Among those closest to Derrida, some were even more impatient
than Gérard Granel to get some reaction out of him to the theor-
etical questions that seemed to them the most urgent, starting with
Marxism-Leninism. This was the case with Jean-Louis Houdebine
and Guy Scarpetta, the editors of Promesse. Originally, this was a
poetry review based in Poitiers, but Houdebine and Scarpetta grad-
ually transformed it into a satellite of Tel Quel. When, in May 1971,
they asked Derrida for an in-depth interview, the author of ‘The
double session’ immediately realized what was at stake. ‘What an
ideological situation over the past few months! And what violence
in the confrontations!’ Houdebine had recently written to him.^43
Derrida agreed to face up to this violence.
The interview took place in his offi ce at Normale Sup on the
afternoon of 11 June 1971.^44 Even though the discussion was
probing, the tone remained perfectly courteous. Derrida, who
said that he had accepted such an interview for the fi rst time, was
admired greatly by both Houdebine and Scarpetta and for his part
he had no intention of evading their questions. Though he had not
reacted publicly to the attacks of Jean-Pierre Faye and Élisabeth
Roudinesco, he did so now, clearly, fi rmly, and sometimes ironi-
cally. While restating his support for Sollers and Tel Quel, he
refused to be enrolled under the banner of dialectical materialism,
insisting that there would be ‘no theoretical or political benefi t to
be derived from precipitating contacts or articulations, as long as
their conditions have not been rigorously elucidated’. Between the
work of deconstruction that he himself was carrying out, and the
Marxist panoply of concepts, ‘the conjunction cannot be immedi-
ately given’.^45 What had appeared as ‘necessary and urgent’ to him
in the historical situation which they shared was ‘a general determi-
nation of the conditions of emergence and the limits of philosophy,
of metaphysics’. Replying implicitly to Faye, Derrida maintained
that Heidegger’s text was of great importance to him, comprising
‘a new and irreversible advance, all of whose critical resources we
are far from having exploited’. This had not prevented him from