364 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
The aff air assumed its full signifi cance a few months later, when
Gallimard published, in its series ‘Le monde actuel’, the book by
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut French Philosophy of the Sixties:
An Essay on Anti-Humanism. Dedicated to Tzvetan Todorov,
this pamphlet – which was something of a bestseller – was largely
masterminded by Marcel Gauchet and François Furet, who ran
the review Le Débat.^27 Ferry and Renaut were already known to
Derrida: they had both spoken at the Cerisy conference on ‘The
Ends of Man’; after their presentation, the discussion had been
extremely tense.
Attempting to establish ‘the unity of inspiration, over and above
the polemics and divergences’, of an anti-humanist trend in philo-
sophy, French Philosophy of the Sixties aimed to proceed ‘to
an uncompromising dismantling of French Marxism, of French
Heideggereanism and of Freudianism à la française’, before calling
for ‘the renewal of an authentic critical philosophy’.^28 Foucault,
Derrida, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Lacan were the main
targets of this attempt at liquidation, whose ideological presup-
positions are clear enough. The fourth chapter is devoted entirely
to Derrida, whose work is described as a ‘hyperbolic repetition’ of
Heidegger’s. For Ferry and Renaut, it can all be summed up in a
few extremely simplistic formulae: ‘If [.. .] Foucault = Heidegger +
Nietzsche, and if we can say that [.. .] Lacan = Heidegger + Freud,
French Heideggereanism can be defi ned by the formula Derrida =
Heidegger + Derrida’s style.’^29 Farewell to the analyses of Rousseau,
Hegel, Husserl, Levinas, and so many others: if we are to believe
these two, there is, between Derrida and his model, ‘no diff erence
other than one of rhetoric’:
French Heideggereanism is therefore dedicated exclusively to
symbolizing ontological diff erence. It is indeed French, even
very French, but only by virtue of its taste, talent, and aptitude
for producing literary variations on a simple, even poor, philo-
sophical theme, and that a borrowed one. Very closely linked
to certain French peculiarities in the approach to philosophical
discourse (the essay, the khâgne, the aggregation), this taste and
this aptitude have been put to the service of one of the most
stunning exercises in repetition that intellectual history has ever
known.^30In spite of this coarse-grained analysis, the work would be
infl uential enough for Derrida to return to it, fi fteen years after its
publication, in For What Tomorrow.. ., his dialogues with Élisabeth
Roudinesco.^31 Admittedly, it was just when French Philosophy in the
Sixties fi rst came out that Roudinesco and he had been reconciled,
after years of mistrust. This is how she tells the story: