348 Derrida 1963–1983
so to speak, gang of four or the Daltons’.* And since some fi gures
from outside Paris needed to be included, he suggested the names of
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe or Jean-Luc Nancy, and Marie-Louise
Mallet from Lyon. This circumstantial explanation did not stop
Kofman from feeling excluded.^16
Derrida would also have liked to have given a leading position to
Avital Ronell, whose academic career had yet to take off , in spite
of the prestigious qualifi cations she had obtained at Princeton and
Berlin. She says:
So long as the electors just read my CV everything was fi ne,
but the minute they met me, things got worse. My temperament
must have played a part. And the fact that I was a woman didn’t
help, of course. When the CIPh was set up, Derrida wanted me
to play an important role in it. Since I spoke English, German,
and French fl uently, and was well acquainted with those
three worlds, there was talk of me looking after international
exchanges, a dimension that was really important to Derrida.
But in the end it didn’t work out and I got a job at Berkeley,
which he wasn’t very pleased about, since in his view it was an
‘enemy’ fi ef, mainly because Searle was there. For me – I was
happy to defi ne myself as a ‘loyal warrior’ on behalf of decon-
struction, this was an extra reason for going there: there were
battles to be fought on the West Coast of the United States,
where Derrida was not much in evidence at the time. But he
sometimes mistrusted me. He’d told me, in the fi rst days of our
relationship, that one day I would make war on him, whereas
I’d decided that this would never be the case, at least not on my
initiative.^17The creation of the Collège international de philosophie obliged
Derrida to intervene in the media more than he had done hitherto.
During the summer of 1983, a two-page interview was published in
Libération, topped by a big, rather romantic shot of the philosopher
that seemed to contradict the headline: ‘The Collège will have no
president.’ On 9 September, it was the turn of Le Nouvel observateur
to allow ‘Derrida the unsubdued’ to speak. The way he was pre-
sented shows very clearly how he was perceived at the time:
If philosophy, which was threatened even in the lycées during
Giscard’s term, is today honored in the form that is most
welcoming to the future of intelligence, it is thanks to Jacques- The Dalton Gang were outlaws in the American West in the late nineteenth
century. Here the phrase is equivalent to ‘the usual suspects’. – Tr.