The Derrida International 1996–1999 483
Derrida, so vigilant in his relations with the media, sometimes
fell into other traps. The great American jazz musician Ornette
Coleman, a philosophy devotee, had long dreamed of meeting the
father of deconstruction. When he came to Paris, at the end of
June 1997, a meeting was organized and recorded by the magazine
Les Inrockuptibles. The conversation was so cordial that Coleman
invited Derrida to speak at a concert he was scheduled to give a few
days later at the jazz festival in La Villette. Derrida, touched and
attracted by the proposal, immediately agreed. Over the years, he
had started to enjoy appearing in public. In spite of Marguerite’s
counsels of caution, he did not realize how diff erent this context
would be from those to which he was accustomed.
On the evening of 1 July, without having been introduced,
Derrida suddenly appeared on stage, in front of a packed auditor-
ium, and started reading, in jazzed-up rhythms, the text he had just
written:
What’s happening? What’s happening? What’s going to
happen, Ornette, right now?
What’s happening to me, here, now, with Ornette Coleman?
With you? Who? Well, need to improvise, no? We need toGrossman. She had been very close to Derrida over the previous years, had inter-
viewed him several times and edited the issue of the review Europe devoted to him;
they had even started to make plans for a ‘Quarto’ volume devoted to his work. But
on 14 September 2004, already in hospital, Derrida sent Maurice Nadeau a fax for
publication in La Quinzaine littéraire. Typed out by a third party, the document
contains several corrections in his own hand:
‘Dear Maurice Nadeau / When I dedicated Artaud le Moma to the memory of my
friend Paule Thévenin, this was not merely to acknowledge a personal debt. It was
also my way of saluting a woman who, as everyone knows, devoted almost her entire
life to studying, deciphering, and publishing Artaud’s works. M. Gallimard must be
the fi rst to know this./Now I have discovered, today, on a fi rst stupefi ed reading,
that the “Quarto” edition of Artaud’s works does all it can (countless examples
could be given) to erase the name, the work and even the magnifi cent portraits of
Paule Thévenin. I suppose that this indescribable injustice has been perpetrated by
Artaud’s nephew whose hatred of Paule Thévenin is well known [.. .]. / I am con-
vinced that I will not be the only one to ask M. Antoine Gallimard to do all he can to
explain, and above all make reparation for, such a serious, fl agrant, and saddening
injustice.’
Deeply hurt by this attack on her work, Évelyne Grossman reacted in an inter-
view that, with unfortunate timing, was published in La Quinzaine on 16 October
2004, a few days after Derrida’s death. In it, she stated:
‘Without in the least wishing to engage in a polemic (especially not with Jacques
Derrida, whose friendship for and loyalty to Paule Thévenin I am aware of), I
cannot fail to think that there is too much passion (in the sense of Christ’s passion),
too much sacrifi ce and sacredness in this story of Paule Thévenin’s relations with
Artaud’s work. Not that I am denying the need for passion. [.. .] But to my mind,
this does not in the least mean that the reader should be stuck in this immediate or
epidermic adhesion to the oeuvre, in this blind identifi cation with Artaud.’