428 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
were two areas he didn’t go into: clothes, and his relationship with
women.’^35
For a long time, the Derridas did not have much money. They
welcomed bread-and-butter jobs to get by, whether these were
Marguerite’s translations or Jacques’s activities as an oral examiner
for the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. But by the end of
the 1960s, with his fi rst invitations to the United States and the
courses he gave to American students in Paris, they started to be
better off. Derrida had a good salary at Yale, then at Irvine and
New York, added to his salary in France and his royalties, even if he
was in no hurry to pick these up. Of course, his conference appear-
ances brought in more and more. But Derrida was not a man to
worry about money and it was never a motive force in his life: he
no longer needed to bother about it, and this was enough. Often, he
did not even ask about the fi nancial conditions for him to make an
appearance. And when he spent many weeks writing a long paper
for a conference, he often did this for free. In the United States,
he sometimes admitted that he was taken aback by the huge sums
demanded by certain other fi gures in ‘French Theory’, even though
they were less famous that he. In the universities where he taught,
he was never one to ask for a rise. This was not a matter of disdain
or naïvety; rather, it was not in his nature to talk about money, even
less to haggle.
‘He hated having to tot up amounts and share the bill at the
end of a restaurant meal,’ says Peggy Kamuf. ‘In any case, he was
generally the one who picked up the tab.’ He liked to settle the bill
discreetly, before it was brought to the table. And he did not like it
when people insisted on paying for him, especially when they were
younger or less well-off than he was. David Carroll remembers: ‘He
was the most generous man I’ve ever met, generous with his time, his
energy, his help, his advice, and also his money.’^36 And Alan Bass
remembers a friend saying to him one evening: ‘But Jacques, it can’t
be your turn to pay every time.’
With his children, he was always generous. But he could also be so
with people who, at one time or another, found themselves in great
diffi culties. And when he did someone a favour, he was discreet and
delicate about it. For several years, he did what he could to help Jos
Joliet, who had formerly worked for Flammarion and for whose
novel The Child with the Sitting Dog he had written the preface. In
his most painful periods, Derrida never abandoned him. The philo-
sopher’s elegance in money matters was a form of sovereignty.
Most of the time, he conducted his life in a regular, if not rather
ascetic way. But there was a more Mediterranean tendency to enjoy
life in him, one which he endeavoured to repress in the day-to-day.
It was while on his travels that he sometimes expressed himself more