filmmakers participated in a question and answer session with
the audience. Derrida was relaxed and funny. Asked about his
interest in music, he recounted to the audience his experience
of appearing onstage in July 1997 at the La Villette jazz festival
with Ornette Coleman, at Coleman’s request. While Coleman
played the saxophone, Derrida read one of his own texts. He
admitted with a smile that Coleman’s fans, no adepts of de-
construction, booed and heckled him.
In Kofman and Dick’s film, after a tantalizing, quickly
dropped reference to his courtship of Marguerite, Derrida
remarks, “I can’t tell a story... I just don’t know how to
tell them.” This is a real moment of insight into Derrida’s phi-
losophy, which is supremely nonnarrative (or even antinarra-
tive). Throughout his work, Derrida remains relatively unin-
terested in the stories people tell to explain themselves. He
lacks Nietzsche’s fine hand for the summary psychological
portrait; as I have argued, he would like to reject psychology
altogether. Instead, he thinks of his own history, and anyone’s,
in terms of little details, mostly linguistic. Such details are for
him ways of hiding personal identity rather than revealing
it (as in the trivia ofThe Post Card). These seeming ephemera—
little turns of phrase, a favorite term—provide for Derrida
the equivalent of a Proustian concreteness. His discussions of
Paul Celan prize exactly such secretive, yet strangely intimate,
opacity.
The identification with a writer like Celan (another exile
like him, a displaced Jew) might well stand at the heart of Der-
rida’s identity. Derrida’s true inwardness, one is tempted to
think, remains distinct from both his early skepticism and his
later, heavy-handed generalizations about justice and ethics.
In the last interview he gave before his death, Derrida
said, “I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than
242 Politics, Marx, Judaism