218 Derrida 1963–1983
shamefaced, when I needed to respond shortly afterwards (but
then, immediately, his benevolence, dazzling, his kindness,
much more than just an attentive understanding: his smile.. .).
Finally, that evening – and against all expectations –, his gaiety,
his vivacity, or rather the joy that could, all of a sudden, be so
characteristic.^29A few months before this homage, the last time Derrida went to
Strasbourg, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy had together related other
memories of that stay:
We remember a walk along the Ill: Philippe went ahead with
Genette, Jean-Luc followed with Derrida (Lyotard hadn’t
arrived yet). Genette and Philippe knew each other and were
chatting away; but Jean-Luc was discovering Derrida’s capa-
city for silence and was rather nervous about fi nding himself
reduced to pointing out in turn the Rohan palace, the cathe-
dral, the old customs house, none of which really called for any
response... On the other hand, a bit later, he became more
talkative, and told us a recent story about one of his sons, still
very young, who’d headed off on his bike, on a main road,
without permission. The fear Derrida had felt was still tangible.
We were a bit surprised: we’d just learned that you don’t always
have to talk philosophy with a philosopher, and that the place
for work is in texts.^30The bonds between Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe rapidly grew
stronger, and led to several joint projects.
It was at about the same time that Derrida got to know
Sarah Kofman, whom he soon introduced to the two adoptive
Strasbourgeois. Born in Paris in 1934, the daughter of a rabbi who
had been arrested and deported in 1942, she had lived the entire
latter stages of the war as a child in hiding, in particularly dramatic
circumstances that she revealed only in her last book, Rue Ordener,
rue Labat. She became acquainted with Derrida in 1968. Kofman
was writing her thesis on ‘Nietzsche and metaphor’, with Jean
Hyppolite as a supervisor. When he died, she asked Derrida to step
in; as he was not offi cially qualifi ed to do so, it was Gilles Deleuze
who eventually took over. This did not stop Kofman being one of
the most faithful members of the audience at Derrida’s seminar in
the rue d’Ulm, and she became a close colleague.
In June 1970, Derrida was mainly preoccupied by the health of his
father, which rapidly deteriorated. Aimé had been suff ering from
nephrenic colic for a while, and lost weight to an alarming degree.
The doctors diagnosed a stomach ulcer, then a depressive condition.