The Derrida International 1996–1999 491
[.. .] more love. More mad love, if you like. And more jealousy,
reciprocal jealousy, if that doesn’t seem too senseless and insane!’^37
Derrida’s love of the language and his passion for writing had
brought him much closer to Hélène Cixous. In 1998, they collabor-
ated on the book Veils: ‘A silkworm of one’s own’, Derrida’s text,
took off from a few pages of ‘Knowing’, fi rst written by Cixous. This
was the fi rst time she had brought out a book with Galilée, and it
soon became her main publisher.
The same year, at the invitation of Mireille Calle-Gruber, Derrida
delivered the immensely lengthy opening address at the conference
‘Hélène Cixous, Crossroads of a Work’ at Cérisy, with the inventive
title H.C. For Life, That is to Say.. ., which he exploited in every
possible way, celebrating thirty-fi ve years of friendship, admiration,
and mutual readings.
I will not be able to do much more than sketch out or antici-
pate, between the lines, the interminable conference paper or
the interminable confi dential remarks that I had dreamed of
foisting on you. I would have liked to invent, for the occa-
sion, for Hélène and in her honour, a new genre, and a new
name for this genre, going beyond all the diff erences or rather
playing on all the diff erences, from the whispers of confessional
confi dences and the authority of the lecture, whether philo-
sophical or theoretical, or critical, or poïetic, a portmanteau or
a mot-valise fort Cerisy, somewhere between the confi dence,
confi dence, and the conference.^38Cixous refused to get left behind. She devoted two eloquent
books to Derrida: Portrait of Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, in
2001, and Insister of Jacques Derrida, in 2006.^39 During Derrida’s
last years, they were involved in many dialogues and common inter-
ventions. ‘We had met at the start of our respective careers. Jacques
sometimes wondered whether we could have had the same compli-
city if we had both been writers, or both philosophers. He tended to
think not. I was convinced of the opposite. For me, at all events, he
was a fully fl edged writer.’^40
‘In the beginning is the word [le mot]’, acknowledged Derrida in
one of his last dialogues with Hélène Cixous. ‘Both naming and
word [vocable]. As if I could not think anything before writing:
taken by surprise by some resource of the French language that I
have not invented, I then make something of it that was not on the
programme but was already rendered possible by a lexical and syn-
tactic treasure.’^41 With Francis Ponge, whom he had admired since
his teens, Derrida shared ‘the religion of the Littré [dictionary], a