436 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
inaccessible to me. You don’t write to me, you don’t reply to me. I’m
tired of never knowing how you are reacting to my letters, your own
diffi culties, your eff orts, your hopes.’^61 And when Derrida did reply,
it was now briefl y, which came as rather a disappointment given the
expectations he had aroused.
In 1988, in a letter to his old friend Pierre Foucher, he confessed
to a ‘serious epistolarophobia, a real malady of body and soul’ which
made it increasingly impossible for him to reply to the letters that
were building up, especially when he was travelling.^62 For friends,
he now preferred to use the phone. And where he had once sent
such eloquent letters in reply to the books people had sent him, he
no longer felt up to it. In spite of this diffi culty, he never failed to
write letters of recommendation when asked by friends or colleagues
whom he esteemed. There are dozens of these in his correspondence,
beautifully composed and eff ective. Many of his friends owed part
of their careers to his generosity.
Derrida was a wholehearted friend. Whether they were famous
like de Man, Althusser, and Nancy, or more obscure, Derrida was
absolutely loyal to those he loved. But he was very demanding in
return, sometimes too much so. As Stiegler puts it, this was ‘the fl ip-
side of his generosity as a friend’. Then he could develop a certain
paranoia, and his closest friends could one day fi nd themselves sus-
pected of disloyalty or, even worse, treachery. According to Michel
Deguy, ‘Jacques was extremely sensitive. He could tolerate only
those who accepted his genius without demur.’ When a public con-
fl ict broke out, he required unstinting solidarity. So, during the de
Man aff air, he distanced himself from several friends and colleagues
because their analysis of the situation diff ered from his own. For
quite diff erent reasons, he stopped seeing Maria Torok, shortly after
the death of Nicolas Abraham. Indeed, several of his friends lived
in muted fear of a sudden quarrel, and worried that they might fi nd
themselves consigned to the side of his ‘enemies’, those who were
‘against him’.
The other side of this harshness was a tendency to complaisance.
Alexander García Düttmann acknowledges that he was on more
than one occasion irritated by the ‘cliquishness’ around Derrida.
‘It annoyed me that Derrida treated with such consideration people
who had little more than their loyalty in their favour. But he wanted
to be loved at all costs, even more than to be understood.’^63 Derrida
sometimes suff ered from the mimicry that he inspired, but in many
respects he accepted it and encouraged it. ‘I think he was sincerely
convinced that most of those who fl attered him were people of high
calibre,’ says Avital Ronell. ‘He probably found in his disciples a
sort of mirror that reassured him. The problem is that, by dint of
his telling them repeatedly that they were extraordinary, many of
them started to think they were, and became really insupportable.’^64