‘L’affaire Derrida’

To the Editors:

Thomas Sheehan’s narrative of the publication history of The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin [NYR, January 14] misrepresents the facts. We are sorry that Mr. Sheehan did not verify those facts with the Press.

We did not wish to continue publishing the interview with Jacques Derrida without his permission to do so, and in a translation he disdained. Professor Wolin, after first agreeing to delete the interview for a Columbia paperback edition, then proposed instead that we keep it in the book. He evidently later changed this position, for the interview is not published in the MIT Press edition.

Neither did we wish to publish a preface by Professor Wolin, our author, that we believed would come to embarrass him; portions of his preface in the MIT Press edition are significantly different from the draft shown to Columbia.

John D. Moore
Director
Columbia University Press
New York City