The Territories of Deconstruction 1984–1986 369
consequence, an ‘unpronounceable name’; they said shibboleth
and, at that invisible border between shi and si, betrayed them-
selves to the sentinel at the risk of death. They betrayed their
diff erence in rendering themselves indiff erent to the diacritical
diff erence between shi and si; they marked themselves as unable
to remark a mark thus coded.^42The word shibboleth is, beyond any question of its meaning,
untranslatable: for Derrida it is a perfect metaphor for poetry. But
he also fi nds in it many other themes dear to his heart: exclusion and
covenant, secret and circumcision. As often, his approach was not
exactly to the taste of specialists in the writer, those ‘experts’ about
whom he had waxed ironic a few months earlier when discussing
Joyce.^43 The great philologist Jean Bollack, who was very close
to Derrida at the beginning of the 1970s, acknowledges that their
relations deteriorated at the time of Shibboleth:
We both spoke at the Celan conference in Seattle. Between us,
we maintained a very cordial tone, but our approaches were
incompatible. Since 1959, I’d been a friend of Paul Celan, as
well as of Peter Szondi. After Celan’s death, I had the sense of
a debt. Around 1980, I started to work on his texts with all the
strength at my disposal. I spent years learning ‘Celanian’. And
in my view, the reading that Derrida was proposing was too
hazardous. I wrote to tell him that you couldn’t play that game
with texts like Celan’s, that you needed to pay more attention
to the structures which his poetic language had imposed on
itself. I would like to have gone over with him the very phrases
that he quoted, to try to understand them in their context.
Unfortunately, Derrida had organized his life in such a way
that this kind of exchange wasn’t possible any more.^44Parages and Shibboleth, like Ulysses Gramophone, which came
out a few months later, are demanding works, with a rhythm all
their own. They fall neither within philosophy nor within literary
criticism. Even though Derrida was just then preparing his fi rst
radio broadcast ‘Le bon plaisir’, with Didier Cahen, most journal-
ists said nothing. Readers were few and far between. In L’Autre
Journal, Catherine David aptly summarized what was now the
prevailing opinion:
The rumour is pitiless: Derrida has gone too far. You can’t read
him any more. Even philosophers can’t follow him. Some of
them admit as much with an ambiguous smile. Others wonder
what he is getting up to – this thinker who once set the tone for
French intellectual fashion by placing linguistics at the heart