Derrida: A Biography

Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 431

you have to be discovered by the addressee for the tone to be

placed. That’s basically what the work involves: what addressee

am I going to set up for a particular tone to be required of me,

and for me to base my work on that request? What is requested

of me? Who is asking me for what?^44

Derrida claimed to produce texts that were generally ‘more than
an article and less than a book’, with the feeling that he was always
writing at too great length. He worked on several things at once,
‘or rather on just one’, he corrected himself, ‘with several projects
in mind that persecute me’. Rather than writing to commission
(sur commande), Derrida preferred to speak of occasional writing
(d’occasion). ‘I’ve practically never written a text without the occa-
sion coming to me from outside; then, of course, I appropriate it

• the purely spontaneous thing, “the” book that I have to write, the
  only one, being indefi nitely postponed, put off... .’
  In his interviews with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida also insisted on
  this poetics of the occasion that he had made his own. Accepting an
  invitation to speak or write was ‘a sort of “passive” decision’:

I have never planned to write a text. Everything that I’ve done,

even the most composite of my books, were ‘occasioned’ by a

question. [.. .] Why write? I’ve always have the feeling – at once

very modest and hyperbolically presumptuous – that I have

nothing to say. I don’t feel I have anything in me me that’s

interesting enough to authorize my saying, ‘here’s the book I

planned all by myself, without anyone asking me for it.’^45

The question of the commission (commande) – or rather of the
demand (demande) – was thus fundamental to his way of working.
The responsibility that Derrida imposed on himself was that of con-
stantly responding – to the title of a conference, or to the place in
which it was being held, or to the person inviting him or the circum-
stances of the moment. In spite of the criticism often made of him,
this was anything but a rhetorical gesture. It was a way of thinking
philosophy in situ, considering every time he spoke as a specifi c
situation, a here and now that would never return and was the very
thing that needed to be addressed. A conference paper by Derrida,
an intervention at a meeting, was fi rst and foremost a speech act, a
performative in Austin’s sense; this was a theory that he had criti-
cally debated, but it was for him ‘one of the major bodies of thought
or main theoretical events – undoubtedly the most fruitful – of our
time’.^46 It was a matt er of describing a context so as better to dis-
place or deconstruct it, even if this meant dwelling on it at length,
analysing by what right people had come together, even if this ran
the risk of seeming never to get to the real issue.