424 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
years spent in his ‘sublime’, the little attic where he could not stand
upright, he moved onto the veranda, belatedly adding a very big
library. If Derrida needed so much space, this was because he kept
everything: his old computers, the theses, long essays and other
paperwork from students that he had collected over forty years,
but also the most insignifi cant documents. In the garden in Ris-
Orangis there was also the cemetery for all the cats in his life, and all
the Christmas trees he had transplanted there. The trace, for him,
was not just a philosophical concept; it was a reality that aff ected
every instant. Every object, however humble, was charged with the
moment of life that it had borne. Any everyday or banal gesture
constituted a witness and the promise of a future: ‘When I leave a
piece of paper around at home or when I make a note in the margin
of a book – an exclamation mark, for example –, I always wonder
who’s going to read that? and what will my children get out of it, if
they ever read that?’^22
As Derrida stated on more than one occasion: his principal desire
was less to create a philosophical work or a work of art than to
preserve a memory. The gaze he turned to his past had the eff ect of
saving him and in some way casting a spell over him:
I have the fortunate nature that dictates that of no moment in
my life – including the worst things I have lived through – have
I wanted to say: I would prefer not to have lived this; in this
sense, I am always reaffi rming, always repeating. So when I say,
‘I love what I have loved,’ it is not only this thing or person,
but rather: I love love, if one can say that, I love every experi-
ence I have had, and it’s true, I want to keep everything. That
is my good fortune. And yet I very rarely have the feeling in the
present of being happy, of loving simply what I am living, but
in the past everything seems to have been loved, and needs to
be reaffi rmed.^23Ever since he was a young man, Derrida had been a very early
riser, around 6 a.m. After a fi rst cup of coff ee, he started work.
And when, three hours later, he joined Marguerite for breakfast, he
sometimes said that he’d fi nished his day’s work, in other words his
work for the seminar. After a certain age, he had a short nap after
lunch, but he was a little embarrassed to admit it, especially in the
fi rst years. When he was alone, he could continue to work indefi -
nitely, forgetting meals and the notion of time. In the fi lm Derrida
he says: ‘When I stay at home by myself all day, I don’t get dressed.
I stay in my pyjamas and dressing gown.’^24
The most useful tool, since 1986, was inevitably the computer,
with its monumental capacity for memory and storage. ‘I can’t
do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially when I’m