Living Memory 1988–1990 405
confi de to the bottom of this book what were my mother’s
more or less intelligible sentences, still alive at the moment I
am writing this, but already incapable of memory, in any case
of the memory of my name, a name become for her at the
very least unpronounceable, and I am here at the moment my
mother no longer recognizes me, and at which, still capable of
speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for
her and therefore for the rest of her life I no longer have a name
[.. .]
the other day in Nice when I asked her if she was in pain
(‘yes’) then where, it was February 5, 1989, she had, in a rhet-
oric that could never have been hers, the audacity of this stroke
about which she will, alas, never know anything, no doubt
knew nothing, and which piercing the night replies to my ques-
tion: ‘I have a pain in my mother,’ as though she were speaking
for me, both in my direction and in my place [.. .].^8Georgette Safar died at the beginning of December 1991. And as
Jacques wrote to his old friend Michel Monory, whom he still saw
from time to time, ‘this long, long death, lasting for three years,
does not make mourning any easier and is in truth no preparation
for it’.^9
Exactly contemporary with ‘Circumfession’ is the text Memoirs of
the Blind, which is also very autobiographical and dominated by
pain. It was originally just a matter of Derrida designing an exhibi-
tion for the Louvre, selecting a series of drawings, and then writing
a commentary on them. The suggestion simultaneously interested
and alarmed him; he still had no idea of the ‘overall approach’ he
would adopt. Then in June 1989, he fell victim to an episode of facial
paralysis that immobilized his left eye in particular. It is easy to
imagine his panic. At the beginning of July, he was forced to cancel
a meeting in the Cabinet des Dessins with the three curators who
were supposed to help him choose the images.
I have been suff ering for thirteen days from a facial paralysis
caused by a virus, from what is called a frigore (disfi guration,
the facial nerve infl amed, the left side of the face stiff ened, the
left eye transfi xed and horrible to behold in a mirror – a real
sight for sore eyes – the eyelid no longer closing normally: a
loss of the ‘wink’ or ‘blink’, therefore, this moment of blindness
that ensures sight its breath). On July 5th this trivial ailment
has just begun to heal. It is fi nally getting better after two weeks
of terror [.. .]. And so on July 11th I am healed (a feeling of
conversion or resurrection, the eyelid blinking once again, my
face still haunted by a ghost of disfi guration). We have our fi rst