362 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
limited to the major European languages, started to spread pretty
much across the world. And he was now travelling more than ever.
In 1984 alone, as well as Yale, where he went on two occasions,
he presented papers, gave seminars and took part in conferences
in New York, Berkeley, Irvine, Cornell, Miami, Ohio, Tokyo,
Frankfurt, Toronto, Bologna, Urbino, Rome, Seattle, and Lisbon.^19
Speaking on the most varied subjects, he transformed whatever situ-
ation he was in and made it the starting point of his address. The
here and now became the driving force behind his words. The start
of his paper ‘Psyche: Invention of the other’, which he delivered at
Cornell and Harvard, spoke volumes about this habit:
What else am I going to be able to invent?
Here perhaps we have an inventive incipit for a lecture.
Imagine, if you will, a speaker daring to address his host in
these terms. He thus seems to appear before them without
knowing what he is going to say; he declares rather insolently
that he is setting out to improvise. Obliged as he is to invent
on the spot, he wonders again: ‘Just what am I going to have
to invent?’ But simultaneously he seems to be implying, not
without presumptuousness, that the improvised speech will
remain unpredictable, that is to say, as usual, ‘still’ new, origi-
nal, unique – in a word, inventive. And in fact, by having at
least invented something with his very fi rst sentence, such an
orator would be breaking the rules, would be breaking with
convention, etiquette, the rhetoric of modesty, in short, with all
the conditions of social interaction.^20However prolifi c his output, and however enthusiastically it was
greeted more or less everywhere, Derrida did not feel that he was
working ‘in the noble sense’ of the term.^21 In particular, he did not
feel well, physically speaking. As he wrote to Sarah Kofman in
September 1984:
I’ve had (yet again!) a very diffi cult summer and I didn’t want
to moan by letter (rather serious health problems for me: the
doctor initially thought the worst. Some possibilities have been
eliminated thanks to an ultrasound of my pancreas and liver.
That leaves the stomach. I stalled at the prospect of an endo-
scopy, they’ll do it in Paris. I’d lost 6 kilos – and had 8 and 6
pressure.. .). I’m better, and I’ll carry on with the examina-
tions next week.^22The death of Paul de Man and his break-up with Sylviane prob-
ably played a part in the ‘gloomy anxieties’ that had been nagging
at him for months. The medics fi nally diagnosed a big gallstone