Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 227
In Paris, the course Derrida had given us in 1970 was on
Lautréamont; I’d been fascinated by his approach and started
to read him methodically, stuffi ng my texts with quotations
from his work. In Baltimore, his seminar was mainly a reading
of Lacan and especially the ‘Seminar on The Purloined Letter’.
In order to understand Lacan properly, I decided to read Freud
as systematically as possible. This was my introduction to psy-
choanalysis, which was later to become my profession. Derrida
really liked the piece of work I did at the end of that series of
classes. He invited me to his apartment, with Marguerite and
the children, and had a long talk with me. I remember it as if it
were yesterday: Jacques Derrida in person was sitting next to
me and correcting my grammatical mistakes! A few days later,
Hillis Miller, who was teaching at Johns Hopkins and was one
of Derrida’s most fervent defenders, suggested that for my thesis
I should do an annotated translation of Writing and Diff erence.
I felt that I was being off ered an extraordinary opportunity.
Jacques and Hillis spoke to me about my future and the role
they were planning for me. The following year, in the New York
Public Library, I began to translate Writing and Diff erence,
checking all the references one by one. When there was a
quotation from Leibniz’s Monadology, I read the whole work.^55At that time, Derrida’s reputation in the American university
world was limited to small circles. This was fi rstly because he taught
in French, and so to a restricted number of students, but mainly
because none of his works was as yet available in English. The fi rst
translation, by David B. Allison, was of Speech and Phenomena
(followed by ‘Form and meaning’ and ‘Diff erance’) in 1973.^56 Then,
while Alan Bass concentrated on Writing and Diff erence, Gayatri
Spivak, a former student of Paul de Man, started to translate Of
Grammatology. But neither work would be published for several
years. So, in the short term, it was through individual lectures and
meetings that the principles of deconstruction gradually spread
across the United States. From mid-October, while continuing to
teach at Johns Hopkins, Derrida began to make weekly trips to
other universities. Paul de Man had just left Baltimore for Yale, and
this move would soon have important consequences. For now, he
asked Derrida to give a paper on the theme ‘Literature and psycho-
analysis’ for the Department of Comparative Literature. So, unlike
what had happened when Derrida fi rst visited Yale, he would have a
‘passionately interested audience’ who would have read his work, de
Man assured him.^57 Indeed, ‘The factor of truth’,* a draft of the text
- This is best known as ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, with the word facteur also meaning
postman. It is included under this title in The Post Card – Tr.