414 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Perhaps he rekindled Jacques’s own anxieties too much.’^31 In
Philippe Beck’s words, ‘Derrida was a tormented Mediterranean.
Lacoue-Labarthe stood for many of the things that fascinated him:
austerity, political intransigence, closeness to poetry. Lacoue’s real
dream was probably literary in nature: he thought that Derrida had
“found prose”, as Badiou put it, and dreamed of inventing poetry
like Hölderlin and Celan. This dream obviously had a political
signifi cance.’^32
As Derrida moved away from Lacoue-Labarthe, he became closer
to Nancy. The latter had long suff ered from cardiac problems but
had never bothered to have them treated. It took a major crisis in
the summer of 1989 for him fi nally to become aware of the ser-
iousness of his state. Though Derrida drove himself quite hard, he
implored his friend to take things easier: ‘Take a rest, don’t work
too hard when you’re travelling, do this for me, write away peace-
fully, the way we need to, in the calm of the rue Charles-Grad.. ..’^33
He frequently told Nancy how important his thought, his texts, and
his friendship were to him: ‘Look after your heart, as I do. You need
to take walks, not smoke (smoke less), learn to take, in other words
to give yourself time, a lot of time... .’^34
On 19 July 1990, Nancy told Derrida that he was soon going to
need a heart transplant: if they did nothing, he had only six to seven
months left to live. ‘Both to harvest my strength and to be ready to
undergo a transplant, as soon as a heart was ready, I no longer had
any right to leave Strasbourg,’ Jean-Luc Nancy relates.
Jacques made a return trip out specially to see me, which
fi lled me with pleasure but also with fear. Having to wait for
a transplant undeniably helped to bring us closer together.
He telephoned me the whole time. This was a very impressive
gesture, and it struck all my friends. I’d told Jacques, jok-
ingly: ‘I’m the best Derridean. I’ve taken your concept of the
transplant* literally.’^35Alexander García Düttman confi rms how worried Derrida was
about his friend throughout this anxious time of waiting:
Shortly before Nancy underwent his heart transplant, Derrida
told me: we need to talk about Jean-Luc Nancy, we need to
bring out the value of his work. He suggested to Peggy Kamuf
that a special issue of Paragraph be devoted to him, and wrote
the fi rst paragraph of ‘On touching’, a long article that would- Or ‘graft’ – greff e. – Tr.