Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 425
working at home; I can’t even remember or understand how I was
able to get on before it.’^25 He acknowledged that he was as ‘depend-
ent on it as a drug addict’. But while the computer rapidly became
indispensable to him, he initially found it another source of anxiety.
The fi rst times he saw the icon of a bomb appearing on his screen, he
really panicked. It needed all the patience of Pierre and Jean to help
him tame this object little by little. For while the computer off ered
Derrida immense possibilities, it also came with a huge danger: that
of losing work. In the early days, this happened to him a lot.
I now have at home, I can freely admit, three computers and
two of then also have a zip drive, an extra hard disk [.. .] and
when I write a long text that’s hanging around without being
printed out, I never leave the house without making copies of
the text in question [.. .]. There are at least ten copies that I
leave in diff erent places, because there are also risks of fi re, of
burglary. And here, in my briefcase, I have my essential current
work. This is the neurosis that develops with technology.^26When he was not in Ris-Orangis, his anxieties were even greater.
During the holidays or when he was about to travel, Derrida copied
his work on several disks. He kept one copy on himself, placed
another in his suitcase, and left a third one with Marguerite or his
brother. When he was at Irvine, he entrusted one copy to J. Hillis
Miller in disk form and another in hard copy. As Maurizio Ferraris
relates in his short book Jackie Derrida: rittrato a memoria, one of
the things that made him happy when his archives were taken off to
Irvine was that they left him not only a complete set of photocopies
but also the photocopier.
In everyday life, Derrida was almost obsessively punctual, especially
when it came to catching a train or a plane; woe betide anyone who
delayed him. He did not like dinners that dragged on; in the res-
taurant, he could get impatient if the dishes did not arrive quickly
enough. He preferred small gatherings of friends around the table to
big offi cial dinners, where his nightmare was fi nding himself stuck
between people he did not know, or who bored him. Alexander
García Düttmann remembers:
Together with such intellectual complexity, there were some
surprisingly simple and easy-going aspects to him. I once
spent several weeks at their home in Ris-Orangis. In the
evenings, if Marguerite wasn’t there, we had spaghetti for
dinner before watching television. Jacques would often doze
off shortly after dinner. Generally speaking, he had various
strategies to disguise his need for sleep. At conferences, he