Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 229
sheer level of what you’re writing.’^62 The issue of Promesse with
its major Derrida interview came out on 20 November, shortly
before the new Tel Quel, ‘so as to enjoy a period of exclusive sales’.^63
As Houdebine had foreseen, it did not go unnoticed, and the sales
were better than usual. But something else happened: without giving
any warning to Derrida – who was appalled when he discovered –,
Houdebine immediately sent the issue to Lacan, explaining that
the long note about him had been added belatedly: ‘This is why,
in the issue as published, there is no reaction from us to the criti-
cal remarks made by Derrida, with which we are far from always
agreeing. But we haven’t concealed this disagreement from Derrida
[.. .], without however dreaming of censoring him.’ In his letter,
Houdebine assured Lacan that any reply he might care to give
would be published in the review.^64
Derrida returned from the United States on 7 December. Over the
next two weeks, he was overwhelmed by a sort of avalanche, ‘mainly
because of the current hubbub in our little Parisian circus’.^65 He felt
torn between his intellectual integrity and his desire not to break off
with a close friend and a milieu that was still important to him. With
the publication of Dissemination in the offi ng, in the ‘Tel Quel’ series,
Sollers composed an enthusiast preface: ‘Dissemination is both, in
the wake of an inscription without reserves, risk, dispersion and the
strictest constraint. The most diffi cult thought, the most abrupt and
the most playful.’ Derrida, meanwhile, had left several signs of com-
plicity within the future book: not only was a quarter of the volume
devoted to Numbers, but he made a few fl attering remarks about
Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and Jean-Joseph Goux; and he
occasionally quoted Marx, Lenin, Althusser, and even the Writings
of Mao Zedong. But not even all of this would be enough.