432 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Like his readings, Derrida associated his travels with the notion of
work, of a mission to be accomplished. Sometimes he even felt that
he was following his father’s traces: ‘Would I be doing the same as
he, perhaps, after protesting my whole life against his enslavement?
Would my lecture tours be the theatrical, respectable, sublimated
version of a humiliated father?’^47 As a new Saint Paul, Derrida prac-
tised the strange profession of being a travelling salesman of thought.
No philosopher has ever travelled more than he did. Actually, the
word ‘displacement’ would be more suitable, since there was in him,
he claimed, someone ‘who never would travel, who insists on not
doing it at all, who insists that he never in fact did’.^48
In my primitive French, ‘voyage’ equals work, servitude,
slavery [traite]. And a certain shame even, the origin of social
shame. The consequence of that, and what governs travel, is
this: never associate it with leisure, with idleness, nor even with
active tourism, with visiting, with curiosity [.. .]. I ‘visit’ very
little when I travel, no tourism, except by pretence and by dying
of boredom when I am forced into it.^49His bad conscience was probably forcing him to paint things
blacker than they actually were. Catherine Clément remembers
seeing Derrida in Japan as radiant as ‘a kid fi lled with excitement’,
in spite of a more than packed programme. He loved the attention
paid to him, the break from everyday rhythms, the charms of an
ephemeral return to being a bachelor. Unlike sedentary and family
holidays that brought back all his anxieties, travelling was the ideal
remedy for depression as far as Derrida was concerned. But as so
often, the reality was really rather mixed: while he was happy to set
off , he was at least just as pleased to come home.
When Jean-Luc Nancy expressed surprise that Derrida had
accepted some invitation that forced him to undertake a long, tiring
journey, the reply was always the same: ‘They’re friends of mine, I
can’t refuse.’ Friendship was the fi rst criterion of choice. Derrida
enjoyed meeting up with old friends and returning to familiar places,
creating a form of habit. In New York as in Irvine, he invented
rituals for himself. In Baltimore, already, what he loved was going
back to the house and tomb of Edgar Allan Poe. In Prague, he never
missed out on the Kafka pilgrimage. Like everything else, places
were of value because of the memories they rekindled. The ones that
attracted him most were places already laden with memories.
Trips to Italy occupied a particular place. This was, he wrote in
Counterpath, the only place to which he would like to ‘eternally
return’. It was one of the few countries where he had ‘sometimes
visited without any public or academic “pretext”, with “just” friends
of the heart and the head.’^50 The south partly replaced an Algeria