Postcards and Proofs 1979–1981 317
placed you among the master fi gures of our generation. But
the fact that a philosopher such as you should sit – even for
just a few hours – in the place you are and obliged to reply to
questions comprises a circumstance that we really need to make
the most of – that, at least, is what I personally am going to
do [.. .]. This viva is something of a symposium. We must not
waste this opportunity.^30In spite of a somewhat bewildering intervention from Jean-
Toussaint Desanti, the viva went well. So the fi rst stage towards
becoming Ricoeur’s successor had been completed. People would
wait quite a while for the next move...
On 23 July 1980, one week after Derrida’s fi ftieth birthday, a sym-
posium of a diff erent nature, more open and friendly, began at
Cerisy-la-Salle. Édith Heurgon, who ran the centre, and the pro-
gramme adviser, Jean Ricardou, had for several years wished to
organize a conference about the author of Glas, but Derrida had
been extremely reluctant. At the end of 1977, when the conference
proceedings of Ponge: Inventor and Classic came out, Heurgon
reiterated her proposal. This time, Derrida accepted in principle,
on condition that there would be a dialogue on his work and not a
celebration of his name and his oeuvre. Not wishing to be involved
with the programme or the choice of guests, he suggested that Jean-
Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe run the décade together.
It was to be called ‘The Ends of Man’, the title of one of the most
infl uential texts in Margins of Philosophy.
The programme drawn up by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe was
full and challenging. Among the speakers were Sarah Kofman,
Sylviane Agacinski, Luce Irigaray, Barbara Johnson, Louis Marin,
Rodolphe Gasché, and Werner Hamacher. But the conference
also included a series of small-group seminars on such questions
as psychoanalysis, literature, translation, politics, art, philosophy,
and education. However great their desire to avoid any impression
of being star-struck, people competed to have Derrida attend their
session.
The conference began with a sharp exchange between Derrida, on
the one side, and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, already a duet, on
the other. After their presentation on ‘The question of ethics after
Heidegger’, Derrida accused them of ‘ideological confusionism’,
and rebuked them for having right from the start distanced them-
selves ‘irreversibly’ from Heidegger. Even though he claimed that he
had never had ‘an attitude of dogmatic, unreserved acquiescence’
towards Heidegger, Derrida could not accept the simplifi cations in
which they had just indulged in order to put the author of Being and
Time in his place. The debate rapidly became more heated and the