346 Derrida 1963–1983
one. But imagine the experience I had when, two or three years
later, after Pascale Ogier had died, I watched the fi lm again in
the United States, at the request of students who wanted to
discuss it with me. Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew
was a dead woman’s face, come onto the screen. She answered
my question: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Practically looking me
in the eye, she said to me again, on the big screen: ‘Yes, now I
do, yes.’ Which now? Years later in Texas, I had the unnerv-
ing sense of the return of the specter, the specter of her specter
coming back to say to me – to me here, now: ‘Now... now...
now, that is to say, in this dark room on another continent, in
another world, here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts.’^10Another death, much closer to him, soon came to haunt him. On
3 April 1983, while Derrida was in Yale, his nephew Marc, the elder
son of Janine and Pierrot Meskel and brother of Martine, died in a
car accident. This brutal death would remain, for him and for the
whole family, ‘a terrible heartbreak’.^11 Derrida always kept Marc’s
picture near his desk, next to those of his father and his little brother
Norbert.
Since summer 1982, the meetings on the CIPH, the future Collège
International de Philosophie, became more frequent. In a letter
to Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye had said how much he was looking
forward to their two projects converging: ‘The years of work in
common that will doubtless be planned will thus come about under
the sign of our solidarity.’^12 Unfortunately, the reality was quite
diff erent, and there were never-ending quarrels.
As Dominique Lecourt relates:
We hadn’t initially realized how much Derrida and Faye hated
each other and how much damage from the past they were
carting around. At the beginning, François Châtelet tried
to mediate, but he quickly fell ill. Jack Lang and François
Mitterrand himself had seemed to support Faye, allowing him
to hope that he might be able to preside over the destinies of the
Collège. He was convinced that Derrida had stolen his place.
There was no let-up in the tension between them and there were
more and more clashes, on every kind of pretext. There were
endless problems over keys, who got what offi ce, etc.^13Disagreement was just as great on more fundamental matters.
Faye dreamed of bringing scientists together with artists in a
grand and prestigious establishment; he was fascinated by René
Thom, Ilya Prigogine, and questions such as ‘self-organization’. For
Derrida, the priority was to provide a place for transversal research