Specters of Marx 1993–1995 475
complicated friend. After a very lively exchange of letters about the
Collège International de Philosophie, in 1983, they stopped writing
to each other. But there then followed interminable phone calls
which Derrida gradually forced himself to avoid, asking Marguerite
or Jean-Luc to take over, pleading that he had neither the time nor
the patience. Fragile, childish, terribly thin-skinned, Sarah tended to
turn every incident into a crisis. She had a great liking for Derrida
and his work, on which she wrote a fi ne book,^42 but she also dem-
onstrated a powerful desire for independence from him. As the only
woman in the quartet running ‘La philosophie en eff et’, she felt she
was not properly appreciated by the others.
Derrida was in New York when Sarah died and unable to attend
her funeral. In the homage to her he wrote shortly afterwards, he
made no attempt to conceal the complexity of their relationship
- ‘over twenty years of a tender, tense, and stormy friendship, an
impossible friendship’ – recognizing that, until the end, they had
‘accused one another a great deal, and often’. ‘Impossible: that is
no doubt what we were for one another, Sarah and I. Perhaps more
than others, or in some other way, in innumerable ways that I will
not be able to recount here, considering all the scenes in which we
found ourselves [.. .].’^43 Still, that did not prevent him from having
as much aff ection for her as he had admiration for her work, which
he encouraged everyone to read and reread.
But this homage was not enough to overcome a certain awkward-
ness: apparently, Jacques had not responded when she sent him her
last, highly personal and emotionally charged book, Rue Ordener,
rue Labat. Sarah’s partner, Alexandre Kyritsos, found this post-
humous text of Derrida’s hard to swallow: it struck him as a belated
attempt to make up.^44
Deleuze had been ill for years: he committed suicide on 4 November
- While Derrida had frequently bumped into him, since their
fi rst encounters at the home of Maurice de Gandillac at the begin-
ning of the 1950s, he had not really got to know him. Jean-Luc
Nancy had dreamed of getting these two major philosophers into
a discussion, but it never happened, and not just for contingent
reasons. Deleuze’s tragic death sharpened the feeling of loneli-
ness that Derrida had long been suff ering from. He increasingly
perceived himself as a survivor, especially as he was the one who,
each time, felt obliged to speak of the departed. In the eloquent
homage that was published in Libération, he wrote: ‘Each death
is unique, of course, and therefore unusual. But what can be said
about the unusual when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault
to Deleuze, it multiplies, as in a series, all these uncommon ends in
the same “generation”?’^45
The relationship between Derrida and Deleuze had not been easy,