232 Derrida 1963–1983
a month after these events, the Maoist activist Pierre Overney
was murdered by a guard at the gates of the Renault factory in
Billancourt, as he was handing out leafl ets calling for a commemo-
ration of the massacre at the Charonne metro station, ten years
previously. On Saturday, 4 March, the day of his funeral, nearly two
hundred thousand people marched through Paris, from the place de
Clichy to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Jean-Paul Sartre was near
the coffi n. Michel Foucault and many other leading fi gures were
in the crowd. And it is said that, on that day, Althusser declared:
‘It’s leftism that they are burying.’^7 In retrospect, Overney’s death
marked a crucial moment: the time when the French extreme Left
avoided resorting to a more than verbal violence.
Derrida was deeply aff ected by the break with Sollers, with whom
he had been close friends since 1964, but he always refused to say
any more about it, inviting his readers ‘on the one hand to “read the
texts”, including his own, and especially those of the collection and
the review in the years ’65–’72, [.. .] and on the other hand not to
trust “at all” the public [“grossly falsifying”] interpretations-recon-
structions of this fi nal sequence by certain members of the Tel Quel
group’.^8 This long silence on Derrida’s part means that his exchange
of letters with the young Belgian philosopher Éric Clémens, a friend
of Goux and Pautrat and a member of the editorial board of the
review TXT, is of all the more interest.
There was a rumour going round that Derrida was ‘practically
a member of the French Communist Party,’ wrote Clémens in a
letter of 4 March 1972. To counteract this malicious rumour, he
wanted Derrida to publish in TXT a sort of update, a ‘Supplement
to Positions’, as it were, in which he would reply ‘not to Tel Quel,
but to the question of [his] political relation to, and/or [his] inter-
est in, China and the Cultural Revolution’, so as to emerge fi nally
from his ‘ambiguous’ stance. Like many other young intellectu-
als of that period, Clémens was becoming increasingly radical.
But he was trying not to give up on philosophy, or at least on
Derrida’s, on which he had for several years been giving a seminar
at the University of Louvain. ‘We fantasized that the deconstruc-
tion of metaphysics would open a door to the Cultural Revolution,’
Clémens remembers today. ‘We would have liked Derrida to take
the crucial step, as we had done.’^9
Although Derrida was very irritated by this initiative, he did
reply, explaining his position vis-à-vis the events of the last
few months in a way he would never subsequently do. He said,
however, that he had read Clémens’s letter without pleasure,
and felt it was ‘a pressure’, or at all events ‘a pressing request for
accounts and guarantees’ to which he did not have the slightest
intention of yielding: