The Derrida International 1996–1999 489
The fi ne book Counterpath enables us to follow in detail several of
Derrida’s travels during this period, thanks to the long letters he
sent to Catherine Malabou.
In February 1997, Derrida went to India for the fi rst time, giving
lectures and interviews; in Calcutta, the ‘guru of deconstruction’
opened the Book Fair; in Bombay and New Delhi, he was given
a triumphant reception. Over the next few months, he travelled to
Dublin, Baltimore, Villanova, Montreal, Madrid, Istanbul, Tilburg,
Turin, Pisa, London, Brighton, and Porto – not to mention his usual
sojourns in Irvine and New York. From 9 to 14 December he was
in Poland for the fi rst time, receiving an honorary doctorate from
Katowice and giving two lectures in Cracow and Warsaw. ‘I went
to Auschwitz but won’t talk about that here,’ he wrote.^32 He set
off almost immediately for Athens, where he stayed from 18 to 21
December.
On 5 January 1998, he was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It had been ten years since his last visit to Israel – the delay was
mainly for political reasons. After his lecture in Tel Aviv and a
‘relatively peaceful’ debate, he had a long conversation with Shimon
Peres. The following morning, loyal as ever to his Palestinian friends,
he set off for Ramallah and spoke at Birzeit University.^33 The rest
of the year was almost as busy. In summer 1998, for example, he
took a long trip to South Africa, drawing huge audiences with his
lecture ‘Forgiving: the unforgivable and the imprescriptible’.^34 This
was the fi rst time he met Nelson Mandela, one of the politicians he
had never ceased to admire, and declared that he was fascinated by
the constitution of the new South Africa, which he deemed to be
properly democratic and extremely modern.
This trip was also at the centre of the fi lm his friend Safaa Fathy
made about him in 1998 and 1999, D’ailleurs Derrida (Moreover
Derrida), broadcast on Arte. She fi lmed him in France and the
United States, as well as the south of Spain, amid landscapes
reminiscent of those of his childhood. She also went to Algeria, but,
for security reasons, Derrida could not join the team. The fi lm is
anything but didactic: it superimposes all these places without ever
identifying them, to a soundtrack of Arabo-Andalusian music.
Derrida participated more or less graciously in the productions
that were proposed to him. He often seemed ill at ease and a bit
wooden. In Shooting Words: On the Edge of a Film, the book written
to accompany the documentary, he pondered at length on ‘the
Actor’ he had become, even if it was to play himself:
Never before have I played along to this extent. And yet never
before has consent been so anxious, so under- and badly per-
formed, painfully estranged from any complaisance, simply