484 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
improvise well. I knew Ornette was going to call me up here,
this evening, he’d told me so when we met up to talk for a
whole afternoon, last week. This stroke of luck scares me, I
don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, I need to improvise,
I need to improvise, but well, that – is already a music lesson,
your lesson, Ornette, that disturbs our old idea of improvisation- I even think you’ve sometimes deemed it ‘racist’, this ancient,
naïve idea of improvisation.^16
The journalist from Le Monde wrote a rave review: ‘The philo-
sopher’s intonations are naturally musical, as are his words. The
saxophonist joins in with the words. Mellow!’ But Derrida’s text
was, as usual, long. And people soon started protesting noisily.
There were just a few dozen who resisted the charm of the thing, out
of a thousand spectators, but this was enough to wreck the mood.
They started yelling: ‘That’s enough!’ ‘Shut your face!’ ‘Off , off !’
Some booed, others applauded. Mortifi ed, Derrida was obliged to
quit the stage long before he had fi nished his text. Sylvain Siclier’s
verdict: ‘What was missing? It just needed the saxophonist to intro-
duce the philosopher, a few words of explanation. [.. .] Ornette
Coleman’s idea was perhaps contrived [.. .], perhaps it clashed too
much with the format of the concert.’^17
Ten days later, however, at the château of Cerisy-la-Salle, Derrida
found an audience that was ready to eat out of his hand. The idea of
a third conference on his work had been mooted by Édith Heurgon
and Jean Ricardou in 1993. Derrida was soon happy to go along,
merely expressing the wish that the programme would be less
packed, less ‘inhumane’, than in the two previous décades.^18 Marie-
Louise Mallet would again be put in charge of organizing the event,
and the conference would be called, in a way that was both open and
enigmatic, ‘The Autobiographical Animal’.
Derrida’s paper, which he began giving on 15 July 1997, his
birthday, went on for much of the following day. ‘I infl icted a
twelve-hour lecture on them!’ he wrote, with some pride, to his
friend Catherine Malabou.^19 But this time, there were no protests –
quite the opposite. Since he had not had time to deal with Heidegger
as he had wished, the participants even suggested that he improvise
on the subject, on the last evening of the conference.^20
The question of the animal had always been for him ‘the most
important and decisive question’. Rereading his work from this
angle, he claimed that he had ‘addressed it a thousand times, either
directly or obliquely, by means of a reading of all the philosophers’
in whom he had taken an interest.^21 But in his lecture at Cerisy, ‘The
animal that therefore I am’, he started by treating it from a very
concrete point of view, on the basis of a private experience: