234 Derrida 1963–1983
The relations between Derrida and the Communist Party are worth
dwelling on. Michael Sprinker’s interview on Althusser is again a
source of valuable insights here. Though Derrida was never either a
member of the Party, or a fellow-traveller, this is because Stalinism,
even in its milder forms, had been unacceptable to him ever since he
had seen it at work at Normale Sup at the beginning of the 1950s.
And the Marxist dogmatism to which he had been subjected ever
since his return to the École as caïman had of course not made
things any easier. As he told Michael Sprinker, he viewed the French
Communist Party and the Soviet Union as incompatible with the
democratic Left which he espoused.
Personally, I saw the Party as being closed up in a suicidal
politics already then. It was losing. It had two alternatives:
either it hardened its Stalinism and would lose through losing
its electorate (and thereby becoming isolated in Europe) or else
it would transform into reformism, a moderate socialism of the
social democratic type and would lose also, since the Socialist
Party already occupied that space. That was the dilemma, the
fatal aporia. [.. .] In a certain sense, [Althusserianism] repre-
sented a tough current in the French Communist Party. And
from this standpoint, it was even more suicidal than the Party.
Although in another sense it was less so because it sought
to regenerate a true theoretical thinking to which I sincerely
believe it is correct to pay homage.^12None of this stopped Derrida, just after his break with Tel Quel,
from drawing close to several members of the Party, starting with
Jean Ristat, whom he had known and liked for many years: having
been a student of Derrida’s at the Sorbonne, Ristat had published
a fi rst book, The Bed of Nicolas Boileau and Jules Verne, which
Derrida thought was ‘admirable’. One of his subsequent works, Le
Fil(s) perdu (The Lost Son/Thread), was a sort of versifi cation of
‘Plato’s pharmacy’. But at this time, Ristat was mainly known as an
associate of Aragon. He started writing for Les Lettres françaises
in the mid-sixties, taking up cudgels on behalf of the avant-garde,
especially Tel Quel, until Sollers and his accomplices suddenly broke
off relations with the Party.^13
It was Ristat who conceived and coordinated the special issue of
the review Les Lettres françaises dedicated to Derrida on 29 March
- The list of contributors to these twelve large-format pages
was prestigious. After original artwork by André Masson on the
cover, there were the names of, among others, Roland Barthes,
Catherine Backès-Clément, Hubert Damisch, Jean-Joseph Goux,
Roger Laporte, Claude Ollier, Paule Thévenin, and Jean Genet. The
latter, who had published nothing for several years, took the trouble