398 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
remained ‘diffi cult and challenging’ for him. In a dialogue with
Élisabeth de Fontenay, he pondered the silence observed by de
Man, even with Derrida himself:
I don’t know why he didn’t tell me anything, and why he hardly
mentioned it to anyone else, to so few people. [.. .] I don’t
have any answer, I don’t know, I have only hypotheses. I met
de Man in 1966, we were very close from 1975 when I went
to Yale every year for three or four weeks. Paul de Man then
became, and remains for me, a very dear friend, but we didn’t
know each other very well, we didn’t know about our ‘lives’ – it
happens!This was an opportunity for Derrida to discuss his concept of
friendship, and the essential place that he reserved for secrecy. He
did not think that the condition of friendship was familiarity ‘or
what people complacently call nearness or acquaintance with the
other’.
Our ‘exchanges’, to use that ridiculous word, were always very
discrete. The signs of friendship were clearly given, but we
didn’t say much to reach other. Neither of us did. When I say:
perhaps I’d always known or perhaps he thinks that I’d always
known, I can’t rule out the possibility that he said to himself,
basically: these things are well enough known (since, as we
now know, he’d talked to others about them), perhaps they’re
going round in rumours, perhaps Jacques Derrida knows about
them, he doesn’t mention them, they’re things that go back
thirty years, let’s not talk about them. It’s possible. You know
how things happen ‘in society’; someone has a secret, but above
all he’s in solitary confi nement [au secret], he’s the only one
who doesn’t know that everybody knows. [.. .]
Why did I never ask any questions? I knew that Paul de
Man had a complicated history: he’d left Belgium just after
the war, he’d found settling in America very disruptive, at
least academically. One day he told me: ‘If you want to know
my life story’ – this is the kind of thing we said to each other- ‘read the novel by Henri Thomas, The Liar.’ [.. .] I bought
it, I read it, I was overwhelmed. It was not in the least about
Belgium, it took place later, in the United States. I wrote to de
Man to tell him what an impact the book had had on me. No
reply from him. He himself told me one day, alluding to Glas
and The Post Card: ‘There are some books by you that I don’t
want to discuss with you. I won’t even mention them to you.’
Friendship can cope with certain silences, with the unsaid and
the secret that are not necessarily fatal to it.^46