in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over
the death that awaits are for me the same thing. When I recall
my life, I tend to think that I have had the good fortune to love
even the unhappy moments of my life, and to bless them.
Almost all of them, with just one exception.”^14 The poignance
of this confession is remarkable—as is its claim to secrecy.
Derrida will not tell us what the “unhappy moment” was,
the one that he could not bless. Unlike his rival Lacan, but like
Nietzsche, Derrida had a high, sentimental attachment to the
inner self, whose desires and memories remain inviolable.
We can end here, with Derrida’s moving testimony to his
own life, and with the oddly telling reticence shown in Kofman
and Dick’s Derrida.The philosopher and his disciples had con-
quered the intellectual world—at least part of it, at least for a
time. But, as his evasive comments to the filmmakers and
interviewers indicate, Jacques Derrida retained his hiddenness
to the end. His readers were left to wonder, at the last, who
he was.
Politics, Marx, Judaism 243