In Support of Philosophy 1973–1976 283
In Derrida’s view, quite apart from any consideration of career,
the essential element of his annual stays in Yale continued to be his
personal and intellectual bond with Paul de Man. No sooner was he
back in Paris, overwhelmed by the mass of problems waiting in his
in-tray, than he said that he was full of nostalgia:
I dream of the trips between New Haven, Moon Bridge, and
Bethany, of all those days (happy days, yes!) that they punc-
tuated, like something distant and mythical that I have not
managed to retain. And – a little more each year – I receive
those moments in Yale as the signs of your friendship, of a
very rare, very precious friendship, which despite or through
that discretion echoes in me clearly, profoundly, all the more
distinctly because something is becoming more rarefi ed in me,
the space of friendship is shrinking strangely, dangerously, as
the other (I don’t know what to call it, the other of a certain
worldly society) grows broader, increasing the number of its
networks, its machines and its traps. [.. .]
Those who are amazed (you, sometimes) by my activity, my
zeal for doing or writing things, don’t always see (but you see it)
from what fundamental disabused, weary disbelief (I dare not
any longer even call it scepticism or nihilism) it rises.^44Publishing problems were doubtless weighing on Derrida more
than any others. For the fi rst time, he had a series that he and his
friends could publish in. But their capacity for decision-making
remained subordinate to the publishing house’s real managers, and
this frequently irritated him. To get the projects close to his heart
published by Aubier-Flammarion, Derrida was often required
to add long prefaces to them. This was the case for William
Warburton’s Essay on Hieroglyphics and in particular for The Wolf
Man’s Magic Word by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. ‘Fors’,
the long essay that Derrida wrote over the summer of 1976, was in
many ways a fraught text.
If Derrida had continued to draw closer to psychoanalysis, ever
since his fi rst discussion in ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, this was
largely due to his friendship with Abraham and Torok. Derrida met
Abraham for the fi rst time in 1959, at the conference on ‘Genesis
and Structure’ in Cerisy-la-Salle. Abraham, born in Hungary in
1919, had initially been a philosopher. In 1958 he became a psycho-
analyst, and tried to combine Husserlian phenomenology with the
thought of Freud, in a fi eld where ‘neither phenomenologists nor
psychoanalysts’ ventured.^45 With his partner Maria Torok, he was
also the main person to introduce the work of Sandor Ferenczi into
France.^46
The friendship between the two couples had consequences that