The Derrida International 1996–1999 487
At New York University, throughout the last years, Ronell and
Derrida gave seminars together. She introduced the session, going
back over the elements that had struck her at the previous session
and adding a few references. After Jacques’s paper, she took over
and asked a few questions to get the discussion started.
Everywhere else, Derrida was the sole master of his seminar.
But at NYU, he was, so to speak, my guest, and he accepted
my way of doing things. The situation was very diff erent at
Irvine, where he carried on with the seminar he had started
at the Hautes Études. At New York, he was presenting new
material and his approach was still very open. One year, he’d
chosen as his title the single word ‘Forgiveness’; I didn’t much
like this, and I changed it to ‘Violence and Forgiveness’. When
we met just before the seminar, I told him I’d changed the title,
since ‘Forgiveness’ by itself didn’t work in English. He was
really not very pleased: ‘Look, Avital, how could you take a
decision like that without consulting me? It’s just not on.’ But
at the start of the session, he said completely the opposite,
explaining that the word ‘violence’ was absolutely necessary.
He said that I had tried to drop it, and that I was completely
wrong to do so! You couldn’t think of forgiveness without
violence. There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice. And all
I could do was explain to the audience why I’d wanted to
drop the word. In the fi nal analysis, each of us had commit-
ted a violent act on the other, but this had enabled us to move
forward and produce thought... In the last years, he felt that
I was overtaking him ‘on his left’ and this sometimes made him
nervous. One day, he told me that my radicalism was starting
to be dangerous for deconstruction. He claimed that he always
took ‘calculated’ risks. I told him that this kind of calculation
was impossible. But he sometimes had a really paranoid side to
him. One day he told me that he didn’t feel at ease having my
book Crack Wars in his luggage when he crossed the border.
He said he’d be arrested as a dealer – it’s true that I was born
in Prague! – and this kind of publication could wreck his
American career. ‘At all events,’ he told me sometimes, ‘they’ll
hold me responsible for this kind of language, saying that it all
comes from me!’^28Derrida’s travels had, like translations of his work, become more
numerous – and extended across the world. And he could not
conceal his annoyance when the French press placed a little too much
emphasis on his American activities. As he wrote to Dominique
Dhombres, from Cracow: