158 Derrida 1963–1983
Pierre Boulez, and Roger Blin. But above all, there was Jean Genet,
with whom Derrida was to form a close bond.
Genet occupied a particular status in Paule Thévenin’s eyes:
she fed him, typed out his texts, did his washing, and looked after
his papers. For her, he was rather like ‘a second Artaud, a living
Artaud’.^8 Thévenin was also in search of new critical discourses
to rekindle interest in Genet’s work, a work which had been a bit
smothered by Sartre’s celebrated Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,
published in 1952 as volume I of Genet’s Oeuvres complètes.
At their very fi rst encounter, something very powerful happened
between Derrida and Genet. Thévenin was a little apprehensive at
leaving the two men alone for a moment while she cooked dinner.
But when she came back from the kitchen, she found them absorbed
in such intense conversation that she felt almost like an intruder.
Usually, Genet hated intellectuals or at least mistrusted them. But
with Derrida, friendship was immediate, and never faded thereaf-
ter. When they met, Genet was going through a diffi cult period:
Abdallah, who had been his companion for seven years, had com-
mitted suicide in 1964. Genet had given up writing and burned
several manuscripts; he no longer wanted to hear a word said about
literature, at least not his own. This did not hinder a great sense of
closeness, which Derrida described to Thévenin:
Will you please tell Jean Genet, when you can fi nd the words
and the opportunity, what I will never dare to tell him, will
never be able to tell him: that for me, it’s a real feast – sober,
peaceful, inner, but true – to meet him and talk with him, to
listen to him, to witness his way of being. [.. .] Of all the people
I’ve been lucky enough to meet at yours, he’s the one I love the
most.^9Genet was sometimes as intimidated by Derrida as the latter
could be by him. The most burning philosophical issues preoccupied
Genet, as is shown by this fragment from a long letter he wrote to
Derrida:
When you left Paule’s apartment, the last time we met, I still
had a great number of things to say to you, especially to ask
you. [.. .] I wish [.. .] you could tell me whether it’s by thinking,
carefully, that one manages, in philosophy, to ‘choose’ deter-
minism – or its opposite. By what intellectual operation does
one make this choice? Does it come quite naturally, following
an act of faith? Like a throw of the dice that is justifi ed after
it’s taken place? Why am I a Communist? Thanks to a gener-
ous temperament rationalized after the event? Or a nationalist,
why, and how? Is not the irrational – the aleatory – at the start