Jacques Derrida — to life

Abstract

Ten years ago I wrote a letter to Jacques Derrida. The occasion for the letter was my reading of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, and this confession or declaration: ‘friendship keeps me alive’ (R, 4). Also, from afar, without having seen or heard him for a very long time, I wanted to show him my living friendship towards him. It is this loyalty that I wish to recall today. One summer last century, Jacques Derrida said to me, ‘Be unconscious!’ An imperative to which I have been faithful, in my own way, since it has been, for a long time, so vital. It was during our first meeting in the summer of 1987, in a place of exile, Dartmouth College, NewHampshire, USA. I had come from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris to teach in the Department of French and Italian for a year. He came to give a lecture at The School of Criticism and Theory, then at Dartmouth, now at Cornell. I had a note delivered to him, yet another letter, in his temporary office on campus, entitled: ‘Frenchman speaks to another Frenchman in a foreign land!’ He saw me in his office and gave me the aforementioned advice. Today, I hear that imperative that was addressed to me in the following way: ‘Be responsible!’ In memory of him and not just in his memory. Glas—a work devoted to Hegel and Genet—was then my first reading of Jacques Derrida; that same year, Jean Genet’s A Prisoner of Love was published posthumously. I had brought it with me in my luggage to the United States; it would become the subject of my dissertation, which I would complete under his directorship. My work with Derrida on the last book of Genet was an investigation of the many issues raised by the writer: a reflection on origins, violence, secrets, debt and inheritance, the legacy of the