358 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
We often suppose that woman, as mother, is used and made
an instrument of by man. But we forget that the concern with
descendants does not belong exclusively to men. From this
point of view, the ‘instrumentality’ is necessarily reciprocal,
and the question of knowing which one uses the other, which
one makes a means or an instrument of the other, is not easily
decidable. This is confi rmed today, now that procreative and
contraceptive techniques have given women control over their
own reproduction. Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science that
for a woman ‘man is only a means: the end is always the child.’
This provocative affi rmation is in the process of coming true,
women ultimately choosing with which man and at what
moment they will have children.^8The beginning of 1984 was an emotional time for Derrida for
other reasons. Although he was unable to attend Paul de Man’s
funeral, he did cancel a long-standing plan to go to Poland so that
he could take part in the homage to de Man organized at Yale
University on 18 January. He spoke only briefl y, however, having
‘the strength for only a few very simple words’: ‘At a later time, I
will try to fi nd better words, and more serene ones, for the friendship
that ties me to Paul de Man (it was and remains unique), what I, like
so many others, owe to his generosity, to his lucidity, to the ever so
gentle force of his thought.’^9
Over the following weeks, Derrida did indeed write three long
papers – ‘Mnemosyne’, ‘The art of memoirs/memories’, and ‘Acts:
The meaning of a word given’ – which he gave in French at Yale,
in the spring, before repeating them in English at the University of
California, Irvine, near Los Angeles, on what was probably his fi rst
visit there. With these homages, a new period in his life seems to have
opened up, dominated by memory, fi rst and foremost, with which he
claims that his relationship was as passionate as it was painful:
I have never known how to tell a story.
And since I love nothing better than remembering and
Memory itself – Mnemosyne – I have always felt this inability
as a sad infi rmity. Why am I denied narration? Why have I not
received this gift [.. .] from Mnemosyne?^10Dominated, too, by mourning, from which memory was in his
view inseparable, these three papers, developing Derrida’s medita-
tion begun in ‘The deaths of Roland Barthes’, inaugurated the long
series of homages to the dead collected in The Work of Mourning.
This kind of speech is immediately in thrall to a certain impossibil-
ity, since it is mainly addressed to someone who is now past all
address: