434 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
was that of a racket in the back seat of a 2 CV. During the 1980s,
he went jogging, something he had picked up during his stays in
California, but when he found that the pleasure promised was a little
slow in coming, he eventually stopped. He had never liked walking
and now avoided it more and more. Only swimming continued to be
a real source of enjoyment, but only at the seaside.
Since the period when Michel Monory had dragged him off to
the theatre, he tended to fi nd plays boring, Shakespeare apart. Of
course, he closely followed the plays of his friends, those written by
Hélène Cixous or put on by Daniel Mesguisch, the theatre perfor-
mances in which Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
played a part. But this was more out of friendship than any real
interest.
Cinema was much more important. During Derrida’s childhood
in Algiers and his student years in the Latin Quarter, he saw a
great many fi lms. In Ris-Orangis, things were more complicated.
So he mainly went to the cinema when he was in the United States.
Unlike Deleuze, who wrote two major works on the subject, there
was nothing of the ‘cinephile’ about Derrida. What he sought from
cinema fi rst and foremost was a way of freeing himself from taboos
and forgetting his work. In an interesting interview with Les Cahiers
du cinéma, he extolled this dimension of a ‘culture that leaves no
traces’:
It’s an art that is still popular [.. .]. It’s even the only great
popular art. [.. .] We really need to let it stay that way. [.. .]
When I’m in New York or California, I see a countless number
of American fi lms, anything that’s on and the fi lms that people
are talking about – I’m very good at keeping up. It’s a time
when I’m free and able to rediscover this popular relation with
cinema that is essential to me. [.. .] It’s a gift of my youth, and
I’m extremely grateful to cinema for bringing me this, getting
me out of my professorial role. Cinema remains for me a great
hidden enjoyment, secret, avid, greedy, and thus infantile.^56He had only a moderate liking for Woody Allen, too European
for his tastes. What he really liked were, fi rstly, fi lms about Mafi osi
and what in his view constituted pure American cinema. He never
tired of the Godfather trilogy, or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time
in America and Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. ‘In cinema I like there to be
an intelligence that isn’t that of knowledge, or intellectual in quality,
but of the way it’s directed.’^57 Le Grand Pardon by Alexandre
Arcady, a family saga set in the world of gang leaders in the Jewish
pied-noir milieu, was also a favourite. He was quite open about these
tastes: asked one day about any infl uence that the fi lms of Godard
might have had on his work or his imagination, Derrida replied