280 Derrida 1963–1983
Derrida returned to Paris even more tired than when he had left,
with ‘a need for silence, for rest, for gentle strolls’ that he did not
manage to satisfy. On his return from Yale, at the beginning of
October, he found so much work waiting for him that he could not
hide his dejection. ‘I’m exhausted, everything is beyond me (in par-
ticular the Greph, the École, Flammarion, Joliet and Sarah.. .),’ he
wrote to Lacoue-Labarthe as he polished off Mimesis.^34
This work, published in November 1975 by Aubier-Flammarion,
had the appearance of a manifesto for the series ‘La philosophie
en eff et’ as well as being a theoretical counterpoint for the work of
the Greph. When La Quinzaine littéraire brought the six authors
together for a debate discussion, Derrida declared right from the
start that Mimesis was not a book of philosophy, but a work that, in
its writing and in its themes, ‘is trying to shift the philosophical, to
reinscribe it in fi elds which it has always apparently dominated’.
Against this ‘belief’ in philosophical hegemony, we are plugging
the code and the norms of philosophical discourse into others
that are not recognized as philosophical, such as Hoff mann,
Brecht, and a few other places. In short, it is not a book whose
norms follow what is expected these days from a philosophical
discourse, by those norms which still control, powerfully, scho-
lastically, so many books that claim to be anti-philosophical.^35A more radical approach was deployed in Le Monde. Christian
Delacampagne emphasized that the authors had sought to express
themselves as one: ‘Here is the result: an interview, probably the fi rst
of its kind, signed “collectively”.’ One of the contributors insisted
that Mimesis ‘does not “bring together” contributions on a “theme” ’.
The book attempted, instead, to ‘undermine the idea of “contribu-
tions” signed by several “authors” ’. And indeed, in the very strange
text that acts as a preface, ‘a fi ctive I, neither singular nor plural,
nor collective, refers to six so-called “proper” names’.^36 Subtle and
sophisticated, such an attitude is the polar opposite of the massive
return of the subject and authorial ego that was characteristic of the
nouvelle philosophie, whose moment of triumph was approaching.
However active and effi cient the way he managed his many activi-
ties, Derrida continued to feel dissatisfi ed by the life he was leading.
In a letter to Paul de Man, he described perfectly the ambivalence he
felt:
The ‘Parisian scene’ (as I call it, for short, to simplify matters),
and everything that keeps me tied up in it, tire me and discour-
age me – to the point of despair. They stop me working and I
dream of some kind of break, conversion, retirement. But I’m
not going to start complaining all over again. In fact, in spite