376 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
This paper, with all its insights, was in many ways a preparation
for ‘Circumfession’. In a note, Derrida also acknowledged that this
was the most ‘autobiographical’ discourse he had ever risked:
If one day I had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would
begin to speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this
fact: I have never yet been able – lacking the ability, the compe-
tence, or the self-authorization – to speak of what my birth, as
one says, should have brought closest to me: the Jew, the Arab.^58Several of Derrida’s interventions in the mid-eighties concerned the
aesthetic fi eld. He proposed a ‘reading’, in the form of a dialogue, to
accompany Right of Inspection, an erotic, silent photographic narra-
tive by Marie-Françoise Plissart that would later be rediscovered in
the light of Queer Theory.^59 He composed a new study on Antonin
Artaud, ‘Maddening the subjectile’, focusing on the portraits assem-
bled and presented by Paule Thévenin.^60 He ventured for the fi rst
time to write about Shakespeare, when his friend Daniel Mesguich
directed Romeo and Juliet in 1986 at the Théâtre Gérard-Philippe in
Saint-Denis.^61 Even though he admitted to an ‘intimidated’ respect
for Shakespeare’s work, he would like one day, he said, to become
a ‘Shakespeare expert’.^62 He would partly realize this ambition
with Specters of Marx, where the presence of Hamlet is almost as
powerful as that of Marx.
At the end of 1984, Derrida also played a part in the auda-
cious exhibition that Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput
were planning at the Pompidou Centre, with the title ‘Les
Immatériaux’. One of the exhibition spaces was to be devoted to
the ‘Épreuves d’écriture’ (‘Proofs/tests of writing’): some twenty
authors were invited to contribute, including Daniel Buren, Michel
Butor, François Châtelet, Maurice Roche, and Jacques Roubaud.
Lyotard’s idea was to ‘gauge the eff ects of “new machines” on the
formation of thought’: he off ered them an interactive platform for
writing. Each of them was to choose a certain number of words from
a list and compose short texts, before reacting to the others’ pieces.
But though this seemed like a stimulating concept, the technology
was still in its infancy. With some diffi culty, an imposing computer
equipped with a modem and accompanied by a simple beginner’s
manual was installed in Ris-Orangis. When this machine made its
entry into his house, Derrida felt that a monster had just been let
in. This was his fi rst contact with information theory and, for all his
goodwill, he found it extremely diffi cult to use.^63
The most unusual project of this period would associate Derrida
with two of the most innovative architects of the day: the Franco-