7 Severed Ties 1972–1973
It was New Year, 1972. This was the time of year to exchange good
wishes, a habit to which Derrida would remain faithful, and he sent
Henry Bauchau, whom he was sorry he had not seen for a long time,
a long and rather melancholy letter:
The life I’ve been leading, that many of us have been leading,
worse luck, is becoming more and more depressing and absurd,
mainly because of our sterile, inattentive, abstract busyness,
which means that every day is swept up into social life, the
worst days and the best too. I’m increasingly frustrated by
everything that stops me seeing friends, talking with them,
sharing time with them. And there are more and more things
that stop me, they keep piling up, bringing me slowly and surely
to a kind of intolerable and fatal suff ocation. [.. .] The ‘Paris’
scene is asphyxiating – and empty, too.^1A few days later, he sent Sollers an aff ectionate letter, in which
there was nonetheless a certain embarrassment, about the manu-
script of his novel, Lois (Laws): ‘I’m sorry for being so late. I wanted
to re-read it. And I’ll have to read it again, of course, more than
once. [.. .] Diffi cult, ultimately impossible to write about Lois. The
text is a minefi eld. At every moment, you risk [.. .] landing on a bad
square on the board (prison, pit, labyrinth, etc.). But what a game!’
This is very far from the enthusiasm he had immediately expressed
after his fi rst reading of Numbers.
Over the next few days, things speeded up. On 18 January, Derrida
informed Houdebine that he had responded to an interview request
from Antoine Casanova, the editor in chief of La Nouvelle Critique –
and he had done so in spite of the now total breaking off of relations
between Tel Quel and the Communist Party. But this meeting, he
insisted, by no means indicated that he was going over to their side.
‘I had told you how I thought things would develop, and I was quite
right. I restated well-known “positions” and very fi rmly, very clearly