438 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
go for long swims. ‘He always said “I feel alive again”,’ remembers
his brother René. Derrida, inclined to vanity, was happy to acquire
a suntan and to have a more active physical existence, something
that he had to repress in everyday life. He enjoyed the sun and the
sea, which he missed in Paris, and which played a part in his love
of California. Irrespective of his social life, Derrida was also glad
to meet up with old friends and return to places that he loved, such
as the Musée Matisse and the Fondation Maeght. Every year, he
went back to Èze to carry out a symbolic act: sending a postcard to
Blanchot, who had lived there for a long time.
Derrida never rid himself of some of the rather archaic aspects of
his family inheritance. As his mother had been a compulsive poker
player, she had performed many little rituals so as not to incur
bad luck. According to Peggy Kamuf, even though he made fun of
himself for it, Derrida remained very superstitious. He would fab-
ricate little secret rites, and carry out all sorts of calculations that
tormented him but that meant he would not infringe certain rules.
His mother had hated green, and for him this colour was always
associated with misfortune. He carefully avoided all clothes in that
colour and did not like Marguerite wearing it. This superstition
could become an obsession and take a serious turn. Robert Harvey
claims that one day, in New York, Derrida held up a conference
so that he did not have to sit on a chair covered in green. And this
phobia was far from being the only one:
A family superstition that I still respect today: when leaving,
once the threshold has been crossed, never retrace one’s steps
back inside. It gives rise to comic situations I don’t dare
describe. Especially when, before a long voyage, mother or
sister or wife has already thrown water at you on the doorstep
to mark the moment when, having left, only then must you
turn around and say goodbye. One returns alive only on that
condition.^70These were not mere traditions. These beliefs were directly linked
to his anxiety. One day when Marguerite retraced her steps to get
something she had left inside the house, Derrida asked her: ‘What
are you doing that for? Do you want me to be anxious all day?’
But even though he sometimes felt a vague sense of guilt about
this heritage, he tried to turn it into an object of thought, and the
theme of spectrality assumed an ever great place in his work. After
all, Freud himself had taken an intense interest in these questions,
especially in his relations with Ferenczi. In his text ‘Telepathy’,
Derrida examined this sometimes derided interest with curiosity and
sympathy.^71