Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 429
freely, especially when he wanted to impress young women. In those
cases, he was quite susceptible to splashing money about, to big
hotels and ephemeral luxury. He probably inherited this taste from
his mother, for whom poker had been a major passion. And while
Derrida himself seems not to have been much of a gambler, it was
with a certain pleasure that he entered the door of a casino or went
on a jaunt to Las Vegas during one of his stays in California. In the
interview for El País, after all, he had admitted, rather unexpectedly,
to ‘a certain lack of seriousness’ as his main character trait.
Derrida had a very odd relation to reading. Marguerite says that
one day, at Les Rassats, as she was deep in Balzac’s Splendours and
Miseries of Courtesans, Jacques glanced at what she was reading
before retorting: ‘Ah, you’ve got all your life ahead of you!’ Derrida
found it very diffi cult to read just for pleasure.
For some time now, I have experienced as a real misfortune the
fact that I am less and less able to read without that reading
getting involved in a writing project, thus a selective, fi ltering,
preoccupied and preoccupying reading. When I read, it is in
short spurts and most often in the middle of writing, of grafting
the writing onto what I read. But as for reading in large, wel-
coming waves, I feel myself more and more deprived of it. It is
a real deprivation.^37In the books on which Derrida worked, you can see ‘the traces of
the violence of pencil marks, exclamation marks, arrows, underlin-
ings’.^38 Reading was already a form of work, it was the fi rst stage of
writing.
I read with a project in mind. I rarely read in a disinterested
manner [.. .], so I read in an active, selective, too selective way,
not passive enough. [.. .]
I read very impatiently, very quickly, and this selective impa-
tience costs me dear: probably a great number of injustices, of
negligences. But very often, opening a book in the middle, this
impatience has thrown me towards what I was seeking, or what
I didn’t know I was seeking but then found. [.. .]
I realize that it’s in writing on a literary text that I start to
read it and that my fi rst reading, comprised of intermittent
fl ashes, is full of gaps. [.. .] Basically, I read for the purposes of
teaching.^39The technology of writing had always interested him. He enjoyed
pointing out that Nietzsche was the fi rst thinker in the West to
possess a typewriter, whereas for Heidegger only handwriting was