Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 421
I got there, I was dead beat. I tried to grab forty winks in the car
that came to pick me up from the airport. But as soon as I started
to speak, any trace of tiredness evaporated.’ Then, he added: ‘I’m
crazy.’ In public, Derrida was galvanized by the interest of his lis-
teners. His powers of physical resistance were much greater than in
his youth. He said so himself: ‘I was more physically fragile then [at
the age of twenty], and I would’ve collapsed from doing a fraction
of what I do now. The reception of the work is what gives me this
energy.’^10
One should not underestimate the aspect of oral performance, the
almost theatrical quality of Derrida’s later texts and, of course, his
seminars and interventions. As Michel Lisse notes, a lot of Derrida’s
texts were written to be performed: ‘Sometimes the rhythm slows
down, sometimes it speeds up; quotations in German interrupt
the French phraseology, several languages mingle. Certain pas-
sages, although serious, cause laughter by highlighting aporias or
repeating terms.’^11 The writer Max Genève, a long-standing friend,
habitually read Derrida’s work but had not heard him speak in
public; after a conference paper, he said he was ‘seduced not merely
by the restless audacity of the text itself, but also by its perfor-
mance, its perfect diction, the energetic gestures, especially the one
used to announce quotation marks, which evoked the torero just
about to stick in his banderillas or the cowboy wielding a pistol in
each hand’.^12 Speaking for hours on end, sometimes for a whole
day, taking part in a debate or answering questions in a demand-
ing interview: these were all so many physical performances that,
as with great sportsmen, liberated Derrida’s dose of endorphins
and made him euphoric. Even more than writing, he liked to ‘talk
philo sophy’.^13 He drew nourishment from his own words and their
eff ect on the audience. For a few hours, all his anxieties could be
forgotten. Never, perhaps, did he feel so fully alive as then.
In public, whatever he did, Derrida was now centre stage and
attracted attention. He had been so timid and unsure of himself
when he came to Paris, he had observed with envy the confi dence
of someone like Gérard Granel; over the course of the years, he
had become increasingly solar. Many of his friends and colleagues
referred to his narcissism. If some of them described him as a bit
of ‘a monster’, this was because it went far beyond traditional
narcissism: Derrida practised it to excess, thereby questioning the
boundaries of narcissism and turning it into a philosophical gesture.
The fairest assessment is probably Maurice Olender’s: he describes
it as ‘a radiant narcissism’.^14
Derrida had an irresistible desire to seduce. And if he almost
never spoke of his relationship to women, this was because his
obsession with secrecy was greater in this area than in any other.