A New Hand of Cards 1982–1983 345
Over the following months, Derrida and de Man would write to
and phone each other very frequently. Illness and the threat of death
made their relation more intense than ever.
In 1982 – some time after a proposal from Marguerite Duras that
came to nothing – Derrida agreed for the fi rst time to appear in a
fi lm. Ghost Dance, a feature by the English director Ken McMullen,
made him play himself, next to Pascale Ogier, in a strange but mem-
orable way. The fi rst scene is very short but repeated ad nauseam: it
takes place in the café Le Sélect, in front of a Titus-Carmel poster.
Between the takes, the pretty young actress explains to the philo-
sopher what ‘eye-line’ means in cinematic terms – the way you look
each other in the eye. This experience left its mark on him.
Another, much longer sequence, took place in Derrida’s offi ce.
As Ogier asks him whether he believes in ghosts, he launches into a
veritable discourse on spectrality, a theme that would soon become
central to his work:
Do you start off by asking a ghost whether he believes in
ghosts? Here, the ghost is me... The minute I’m asked to
play my own role in a more or less improvised fi lm scenario, I
have the impression that I’m letting a ghost speak in my place.
Paradoxically, instead of playing my own role, I’m uncon-
sciously letting a ghost ventriloquize myself, in other words
speak in my place. [.. .] The cinema is an art of phantomachia,
[.. .] it’s an art in which ghosts are allowed to return. [.. .] All
this needs at present to be discussed, in my view, in an exchange
between the art of the cinema, in its most unprecedented
aspects, never seen before, and something psychoanalytic. I
think that cinema + psychoanalysis = science of the ghost.
[.. .] I think that the future belongs to ghosts, that technology
increases greatly the power of ghosts.^9Derrida evokes the ghosts of Marx, Freud, and Kafka... and of
the woman he is talking to. How could he have imagined that the
actress would die in 1984, at the age of twenty-four, thereby giving
this exchange a disturbing resonance that he would later mention
several times?
At the end of my improvisation, I was to say to her: ‘And
what about you, do you believe in ghosts?’ And, repeating it
over and over, at least thirty times, at the request of the fi lm-
maker, she says this little sentence: ‘Yes, now I do, yes.’ And
so, already during shooting, she repeated this sentence at least
thirty times. Already this was a little strange, a little spectral,
out of sync, outside itself; this was happening several times in