368 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
One of Derrida’s fi rst books to be published by Galilée, Parages,
brought together four texts written and published between 1975 and
1979: ‘ ‘Pace not(s)’, ‘Living on’, ‘Title to be specifi ed’, and ‘The
law of genre’. All four dealt with the fi ctional works of Maurice
Blanchot, especially Death Sentence and The Madness of the Day.
As Derrida explains in his introduction to the volume:
Other works of Blanchot have been accompanying me for
a long time, those that are situated, also improperly, in the
domains of literary criticism or of philosophy. [...] But the fi c-
tions remained inaccessible to me, as though plunged in a fog
out of which only some fascinating glimmers, and sometimes,
but at irregular intervals, the light of an invisible lighthouse on
the coast reached [parvenaient] me. I will not say that from now
on these fi ctions have left this reserve, indeed on the contrary.
But in their very dissimulation, in the distance of the inacces-
sible as such, because they open onto it in giving it names [elles
donnent sur lui en lui donnant des noms], they presented them-
selves to me again.Even though the two men had not met since 1968, and exchanged
letters only rarely, they were united by a ‘friendship of thought’
which remained, for both of them, ‘one of life’s graces’.^39 Blanchot
said this in a letter to Derrida, written shortly after a phone call,
in August 1985: ‘To hear your voice, to have heard your voice was
such a moving event that I was barely able to respond. It doesn’t
matter, perhaps. Since forever, everything has been implicit between
us. This goes to the deepest level and is said by not being said.’^40 He
repeated this six months later, after receiving Parages: ‘For this gift
made to me, not without peril for yourself, by this book and your
books and by everything which at the same time goes beyond them,
I cannot express my gratitude enough – that of having been, for a
while, your contemporary.’^41
At the same time, the little book Shibboleth: For Paul Celan came
out. This was the text of a paper given in 1984 in Seattle. This highly
personal reading of a poet who was of increasing importance to
Derrida mainly focused on the word that gives the book its title:
shibboleth, a Hebrew word with many meanings that has come to
signify a password – the word that enables one to cross, or prevents
one from crossing, a frontier kept under close surveillance:
The Ephraimites had been defeated by the army of Jephthah;
in order to keep the soldiers from escaping across the river
[.. .], each person was required to say shibboleth. Now the
Ephraimites were known for their inability to pronounce
correctly the shi of shibboleth, which became for them, in