Postcards and Proofs 1979–1981 309
Avital Ronell had been born in Prague in 1952. Her parents,
Israeli diplomats, had lived in New York since 1956. She started her
studies there before going to the Free University in Berlin, working
with Jacob Taubes, a rabbi and professor of hermeneutics. In 1979,
the year she met Derrida, she obtained her doctorate at Princeton.
Ronell would very rapidly become a close friend of Derrida, and
one of the most original and striking fi gures in the Derridean move-
ment. ‘I was working on Goethe and Eckermann at that time,’ she
explains.
I was fascinated by the fi gure of Eckermann, the one who could
take down the remarks of his master, reassure and amuse him.
I admired Eckermann’s extreme, perfect passivity. Shortly
before that, Gadamer had told me I should fi nd a master, since
a real thinker couldn’t avoid leaning on a master. So I must
have fantasized about becoming Derrida’s Eckermann. I very
quickly thought I could sense and understand his immense soli-
tude, and I wanted to throw a rope to him. In those days, his
fame was spreading rapidly. More or less consciously, Derrida
was building up a sort of team for himself, disseminated across
the world. In that team, I could play the role of ‘Minister for
Germanic Aff airs’. I applied for this post and I obtained it. For
several years, we had many sustained conversations on Goethe,
Kleist, Hölderlin, and Kafka.Ever since its publication in 1976, Of Grammatology had contin-
ued to enjoy considerable success. Two years later, Alan Bass’s
remarkable translation of Writing and Diff erence was published
by the University of Chicago Press.^3 By this stage, deconstruction
was now in fashion, and Derrida was much sought after. At the
end of summer 1979, he went on a major conference tour of North
America with the older of his two sons, Pierre, who was then sixteen.
As the latter remembers,
What impressed me the most was the energy he could
draw on. We changed city almost every day. Every time, there
was the plane journey, a lunch, a long conference session,
then generally a cocktail and a dinner that went on until
late. The pace of a real rock star. After a few days, I’d been
brought to my knees, which greatly surprised my father.
He was in better shape than ever. I felt that the trip was
galvanizing him.^4This did not stop Pierre from remembering his trip with pleasure,
especially his meetings with Paul de Man, in Chicago and Yale.