Living Memory 1988–1990 403
after the preparation for publication of the manuscript The
Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy of Husserl, his Master’s,
which had aroused the intense interest of Françoise Dastur,
Jean-Luc Marion, and Didier Franck and that came out with
the Presses Universitaires de France in 1990. My task consisted
mainly in checking quotations in German, tracking them down
in the complete works of Husserl – which did not yet exist in
the 1950s –, correcting the translation of them when necessary,
and adding the references to translations recently published
in French. I worked for him until September 1991, when I got
a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But we
continued to meet up on a friendly basis every time I stayed in
France.Another important collaboration brought Derrida together with a
young professor at the University of Sussex, Geoff rey Bennington.
Passionate about Derrida’s work since the end of the 1970s,
Bennington had fi rst acted as his interpreter on his visits to Oxford,
and then overseen the quality of translations of his work into
English. But Derrida soon asked him to join in a more important
project.
In January 1988, I’d published in the Oxford Literary Review
a long and rather scathing article in which I reviewed several
recent books about him. He told me he’d really liked this
piece. A bit later, he suggested that I write the book that the
Éditions du Seuil wanted to publish about him in their series
‘Les Contemporains’. I was fl attered – I could hardly believe
my luck. For political reasons, Derrida really wanted it not
to be anyone French or already identifi ed as a Derridean who
wrote this book. So I suggested, at a lunch at Denis Roche’s,
the director of the series, that Derrida himself collaborate in
the volume: perhaps it was the memory of Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes that made me think of this. Very quickly it
occurred to me that I’d write an analysis of his work without
quoting any of it. I worked on it in 1988, while on sabbatical,
spending quite a lot of time creating a sort of ‘Derrida software’
on my computer. I wanted to establish a real database which I
would use for writing my text. The further I advanced, the more
convinced I became of the solidity and coherence of his work.
His way of writing, and his relationship to philosophy, places
the commentator in a really diffi cult position. Derrida puts
forward not just a reading of many of the major works in the
history of philosophy, but also a rereading of his own texts. On
repeated occasions, I found in his books, allusively formulated,