Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 435
with a sincerity that he himself described as brutal, that there had
not been the ‘slightest infl uence’.^58 This did not stop him enjoying
acting in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance, a rather avant-garde fi lm –
admittedly, he was playing himself, alongside Pascale Ogier.
Though, in the interview in El País, he had claimed that he
dreamed of having ‘musical genius’, he took little interest in music,
apart from the Arabo-Andalusian music of his childhood. He liked
jazz, like a lot of people of his generation, and sometimes took the
opportunity of a stay in New York to attend a concert. But though
he had sometimes met Pierre Boulez at Paule Thévenin’s, he showed
no liking for contemporary music. Thanks to Pierre Burger, a
philosopher before he became a musician, and especially to his own
son Pierre, Derrida liked the Strasbourg rock group Kat Onoma
and went to hear them several times.
Although he had enjoyed going to museums since his youth,
Derrida was unsure of his aesthetic tastes whenever areas outside his
sphere of work were concerned. Without false modesty, he admitted
to his lack of competence. And when he was asked about the visual
arts, he insisted: ‘I’ve never taken the initiative in talking about any-
thing at all to do with those fi elds. Every time I do so, it’s because I
have been asked.’^59
Responding was the very essence of Derrida’s work, but it was also
what drove his relationships with his friends. Until the beginning
of the 1980s, he was an extraordinary correspondent, writing long,
detailed letters that, together with his books and seminars, form, so
to speak, the third component of his oeuvre.
Derrida was literally overwhelmed by friends from every period,
relationships that he tried to keep up to the best of his abilities, in a
very generous and individualized way. As Bernard Stiegler says, ‘he
had an unrivalled capacity for attention, an unbelievable availability
for everything and everyone. It was like a demand on himself, to live
his thinking to the full.’^60 But in the course of his travels, his classes,
and his lectures across the world, Derrida had built up a huge social
network which he found it increasingly diffi cult to cope with. From
the middle of the 1980s, he became unable to respond to the requests
that assailed him on all sides. Letters and messages came to him
from throughout the world: acquaintances from the present and
the past, colleagues, students, publishers, translators, journalists.
He was asked to give lectures, attend conferences, write articles,
provide references, sign petitions... But he had neither an assistant
nor a secretary; he could no longer manage. His correspondence
became more functional, and complaint became a leitmotif – which
annoyed some of his close friends. Marie-Claire Boons, to whom
he was close in the 1960s, continued to write him long letters full
of private details, but could not conceal her frustration: ‘You seem