268 Derrida 1963–1983
of 1973, even though the series ‘La philosophie en eff et’ only really
started up the following autumn.
Derrida was very pleased at these fi rst developments, especially
since it was also Galilée which began publication, in January 1974,
of a new review whose title had been his suggestion: Digraphe. The
publishing editor was Jean Ristat; on the editorial board he was
initially aided by Jean-Joseph Goux, Luce Irigaray, and Danièle
Sallenave. So Digraphe appeared as a friendly review – and aimed
to be a new Tel Quel. Derrida published work in it on several occa-
sions, including the long text ‘Parergon’, which came out in issues
2 and 3, but he took care not to get too involved in its day-to-day
running.
At the start of the 1970s, the idea of community was far more than
a word or a concept for Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe. Both of them were fascinated by the fi rst wave of German
Romanticism – that of the Jena group, in which poetry and philo-
sophy were indissociably linked; they were shortly to publish a
major book on it, The Literary Absolute.^3 Even though Nancy and
‘Lacoue’ had very diff erent temperaments, they taught together,
often wrote in collaboration, and worked on many projects together,
especially at the TNS, the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. But
above all, as Jean-Luc Nancy wrote, ‘their personal and family lives’
formed ‘a quite new kind of symbiosis’ that led to them living in the
same house on the rue Charles-Grad. Inspired by the idea of utopia,
this quasi-phalanstery was considered by many Strasbourgeois as a
decidedly subversive place: the spirit of ’68 continued to mix every-
thing together, for a good decade: ‘forms of life and ideas, political
schemas and social, sexual, and cultural representations’.^4
Personally, Derrida could not have felt further from such an ideal
and such a lifestyle, as he said at his last meeting in Strasbourg with
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe:
This writing or this thinking involving two, three, or four hands
has always been a fascinating, admirable, enigmatic vision for
me, but still just as impossible and unthinkable today. Nothing
seems as unimaginable to me, and I feel this as my own limit- as unimaginable as, in the private life that was indissociable
from the public experiences I have mentioned, the way they
lived as a family community.^5
This did not stop Derrida from suggesting that ‘La philosophie en
eff et’ be run by a quartet: the idea of a collective work immediately
appealed to him. Sarah Kofman suggested the word Mimesis, which
struck him as an open, unifying concept, linking ‘the theoretical
and practical themes of repetition, production and reproduction,