Night in Prague 1981–1982 333
insignifi cant and necessitated several precautions. The fi rst missions
were marked by several incidents: their luggage was meticulously
searched, books were confi scated, and they were accompanied to
the border in the middle of the night.^1 On Saturday, 26 December
1981, the date scheduled for Derrida’s departure for Prague, the
situation was extremely tense throughout the entire Soviet bloc:
less than two weeks previously, General Jaruzelski had decreed a
state of siege in Poland. Without being hostile to the reason for this
visit, Marguerite would have preferred it to be postponed to a more
favourable time. But Derrida, whose timetable was already diffi cult
to manage, would not hear of the date being changed.
Marguerite’s intuitions were immediately confi rmed: at Orly
airport, even before he embarked, Derrida had the sense that he was
being followed. As soon as he arrived in Prague, there was no room
for doubt: he was subjected to constant surveillance, as he related
on his return to the audience of his seminar, in words that put a
light-hearted spin on events:
In the morning, at my hotel, I could already sense police activ-
ity. I turn round and I see the hotel proprietor look at the
clock and grab the phone to announce where I am heading. I
notice someone following me and tell myself, ‘am I really being
tailed?’ – for me, this was the start of the experience of being
tailed – or ‘isn’t it my anxiety that’s forcing me to imagine I’m
being tailed?’
I get into the metro compartment, he was still there, he gets
in next to me [.. .] and at that point I say to myself: I need to
shake him off. So I summoned up my knowledge of novels and
psychology, I tried to remember all the techniques of the genre.
The metro stops. The doors stay open for a few seconds, and
I have to jump out at the last minute... but get stuck in the
metro.^2Before reaching the rendezvous point assigned to him, Derrida,
anxious to protect the anonymity of his contacts, again tried to throw
off his pursuer, darting through shops and passages. But at every
stage, the man set to tail him was still there, impassively waiting.
Professor Ladislav Hejdánek was a signatory of Charter 77 and
had resumed the tradition of the seminars ‘in camera’ that had pre-
viously been held at the home of Patočka. It was at Hejdánek’s that
a few students and colleagues had gathered to listen to Derrida. The
subject he discussed had nothing directly political about it: as at
the seminar he was giving that year at the École Normale, Derrida
spoke on Descartes and his relation to language. His remarks were
quite technical and of interest to only part of the audience; one
of the students even asked how this kind of philosophy could be