240 Derrida 1963–1983
being’. A pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the
masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefi nitely to
re-say the text.^23‘Little pedagogy’: the expression became notorious. For Derrida’s
detractors, of whatever stamp, it was as if Christmas had come early.
(John R. Searle himself unerringly referred to it, in a later polemic,
even though this highly technical discussion on Derrida was far
removed from his own preoccupations.) Deconstruction aroused
fear, it seemed to shake the foundations of metaphysics and Western
thinking, and here it was being identifi ed with the most scholastic,
the most worn-out of traditions, as if Derrida, the champion of
dissemination, were nothing more than a trifl er.
Foucault sent the new edition of the History of Madness to his
old friend and former pupil. In the dedication, he asked him to
‘forgive [me] for this too slow and partial response’.^24 Two years
later, Foucault would again have a go at Derrida in an Italian inter-
view, describing the latter’s relation to the history of philosophy
as ‘pitiful’.^25 The time for argument was over: Foucault wanted to
crush an enemy, even though he claimed he loathed this kind of
attack, in one of his last interviews.* The two men would not speak
to each other for a long time, and even avoided anywhere they might
meet. And this quarrel was one of the things that would soon lead
Derrida to distance himself from Critique.
Derrida’s close relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe assumed added importance after these two spec-
tacular breaks. On one of the fi rst evenings they spent together in
Ris-Orangis, they talked it over at length. Derrida wanted to give
these two young philosophers, whom he increasingly admired, as
much help as he possibly could. Though he did not have the least
power in the university world, he assured them of his support on the
publishing side, especially when it came to Critique and the Éditions
de Minuit.
- ‘I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true
that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author
is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not
my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that
way. I insist on this diff erence as something essential: a whole morality is at stake,
the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. [.. .] The
polemicist [.. .] proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will
never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage
war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a
partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is
harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat’ (Foucault, The Foucault
Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, pp. 381–3).