142 Derrida 1963–1983
realized that he was really unique. A very deep sense of com-
plicity grew up between us. Thanks to him, I had the feeling
that I didn’t need to live just in the company of the dead, the
authors of the great texts that I was reading.^48That year, 1964, was defi nitely one for striking up or deepening
already-existing friendships. Shortly before the summer, together
with his son Pierre, who had only just turned one year old, Derrida
went to Brittany to see Gabriel Bounoure. He had wanted to write
to him as soon as he got back, but he had yet again been ‘seized by
the university monster, which had thrown [him] up, exhausted, on
the shore only at the end of July’. This did not stop Derrida being
charmed by the presence – ‘deep, radiant, benevolent’ – of Bounoure
and by the attention ‘both generous and fully devoted to the present
moment’ that he showed him throughout his stay. But Derrida
himself was in such a state of exhaustion that he felt ‘more incapa-
ble than ever’, after these months of uninterrupted oral exams, ‘of
uttering the shortest sentence’. His fatigue was ‘so profound, and
accompanied by a certain bitter distaste for the profession’, that he
sometimes felt he had lost the ability to speak. He sadly acknow-
ledged as much: ‘My natural way of speaking has become the most
artifi cial way – that of teaching or that of writing.’^49 He hoped to
have an opportunity to see Bounoure again as often as possible, on
each of his (too infrequent) trips to Paris.
It was at this time that Jacques and his wife settled on a way
of organizing their summer holidays to which they would always
remain faithful, with a few exceptions.
They would spend August with Marguerite’s family at Les
Rassats, an old, somewhat dilapidated farm with a big garden, a
few kilometres outside Angoulême. A small annex was set apart for
them, but Jacques did not have a proper offi ce there and so had to
work in conditions of some discomfort. Apart from Marguerite’s
parents, her two brothers and their respective families also occupied
the house. Michel Aucouturier, Jackie’s old classmate at Normale
Sup, had been appointed to a university post in Geneva; his thesis
was on Marxist literary criticism in the USSR, and he continued to
translate and write on the works of Gogol, Tolstoy, and, above all,
Pasternak, in whose work he specialized.
As for September, they spent it in Nice or its immediate environs,
now that Derrida’s parents, and soon his brother and sister too, had
moved there. But while Jacques was always happy to get back to
the beaches of the Mediterranean and go for long swims, the small
apartment his parents occupied in the rue Delille did not make work
very easy. There is general agreement that Derrida was not really
a holiday type of man. August and September were the most pro-