536 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
from his friends. ‘It’s a shame he didn’t consult us,’ deplores Stephen
Barker. ‘The university rules are clear, and Dragan Kujundzic had
broken them. Derrida wrote his “J’accuse” in an excessive, rather
naïve manner. In any case, the offi cial proceedings had already gone
too far forward, the chancellor no longer had any choice in the
matter; he couldn’t go back on the decision he had taken.’44*
Ever since April, Derrida had not had time to revise the inter-
view he had given to Jean Birnbaum. All of a sudden, Edwy Plenel
insisted on having it published as quickly as possible, before the
end of summer. Derrida was irritated by this haste: he mistrusted
Le Monde, which, he felt, had never liked him. It needed all of
Birnbaum’s insistence, with Marguerite’s support, before Jacques
would agree to take up the text again. Several working sessions were
necessary before the fi nal version was ready. As Birnbaum says: ‘He
revised everything in great detail, including my own interventions.
He wanted to open the discussion by talking about his illness, but
he really wanted me to raise the question. The twilit nature of these
pages comes from him. He wanted to refi ne this testamentary text,
and not allow anyone to have “the last word”.’^45
At the beginning of the interview, Derrida began by affi rming, in
the face of traditional wisdom:
‘No, I never learned-to-live. In fact not at all! Learning to live
should mean learning to die, learning to take into account,
so as to accept, absolute mortality (that is, without salva-
tion, resurrection, or redemption – neither for oneself nor for
the other). That’s been the old philosophical injunction since- Relations with the staff of the Special Collection at the University of Irvine turned
sour soon after Derrida’s death. Jackie Dooley very quickly asked Marguerite when
the archives would start to be forwarded again, as if Jacques’s letter to the chancel-
lor had never been written. And yet there was nothing private about it: translated
by Peggy Kamuf, it circulated widely in the circles concerned before being posted
on the Internet. So Marguerite reminded Dooley of Jacques’s position vis-à-vis his
archives: while there was no question of taking back what had been given, neither
would there be any new contributions. A few months later, the judicial proceedings
brought by the University of California, Irvine against the Derrida family came as
a real shock: one morning, the postman brought Marguerite a registered letter from
the Californian Court of Justice, demanding the payment of a fi ne of $500,000 for
non-receipt of the ‘rest’ of the donation, in other words the recent manuscripts.
This was probably a preventive strike: the university management was afraid that
Marguerite, Pierre, and Jean Derrida would demand the return to France of the
archives given to Irvine, something they had never dreamed of doing. At the begin-
ning of 2007, several press articles picked up on this painful and in many respects
indecent aff air, both in France and the United States, until the University of Irvine
withdrew its complaint and a modus vivendi was set up with the new staff at the
Special Collection. The Derrida archives are currently divided between IMEC and
Irvine, but, contrary to what had been originally envisaged, there was no exchange
of photocopies between the two institutions.