In Life and in Death 2003–2004 539
By contrast, it was with unalloyed joy that he saw the issue of the
Cahiers de l’Herne dedicated to him. ‘With Marie-Louise Mallet,
we worked on this huge issue a bit hastily,’ remembers Ginette
Michaud. ‘We absolutely wanted him to see it. As he leafed through
it, he was wonderstruck. He weighed the volume, 628 pages, large
format, in his hands. He was as happy as a child.’^51
But his condition soon started to deteriorate. He was eating less
and less and his nights were increasingly diffi cult. At the beginning
of September, in the middle of the weekend, Marguerite had to
phone for an ambulance as he needed to be urgently hospitalized
at Curie. ‘That Sunday,’ she relates, ‘when the ambulance came for
him, he turned round to look at the house, as if he sensed it was for
the last time... “The illness can develop suddenly,” the doctor told
me the following day. “But none of us thought that his end was so
near.” ’^52
The medical personnel were very free and easy about visits, and
Derrida had several. Pierre came with his partner Jeanne Balibar,
Jean with his wife Emmanuelle. Jean-Luc Nancy, Marie-Louise
Mallet, Hélène Cixous, and René Major also came frequently.
In the fi rst days of October, rumours were fl ying around that
Derrida was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His name had been mentioned the previous year, but this time the
rumour was becoming more and more persistent. Several French
newspapers were preparing major articles or special issues to greet
the news. After a phone call from Safaa Fathy, Marguerite said to
Jacques: ‘It looks like you’re going to get the Nobel.’ Then she saw
tears on his face. ‘Why?’ she asked him. ‘They want to give it me
because I’m dying.’
On 6 October, the prize was fi nally given to Elfriede Jelinek,
depriving philosophy of a consecration it had not known since
Henri Bergson (1927), Bertrand Russell (1950), and Jean-Paul
Sartre (1964) – and also depriving Derrida of the fulfi lment of his
oldest and deepest dream:
To leave traces in the history of the French language – that’s
what interests me. I live off this passion, that is, if not for
France at least for something that the French language has
incorporated for centuries. I think that if I love this language
like I love my life, and sometimes more than certain native
French do, it is because I love it as a foreigner who has been
welcomed, and who has appropriated this language for himself
as the only possible language for him.^53The skin patches used to suppress pain were now unable to
provide relief, and Jacques needed treating with morphine, with a
pump that he could operate as and when he wanted, but that he