Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 439
Derrida, the man of ‘too much’, was at least as much the man of too
little. His solitude was immense, profound. Avital Ronell remem-
bers that he could seem terribly absent, especially at certain meals:
‘There were terrible barriers around him. He didn’t really seek to
establish a relationship in which the other could really confront
him. When I initiated something intrusive, he would accept this,
but he himself would never have started to place things on such a
footing himself.’^72 The dazzling, generous lecturer, the man full of
solicitude for his friends and family, managed all his life long to
create an almost infallible system to protect his privacy. For a long
time already, even apart from his periods of depression, there had
been something fragile and secret within him, something that could
be expressed only in writing – something essential and impossible,
inseparable from the way he viewed philosophy: a demanding, risky
path, far from the facilities of dialogue. He acknowledged this one
day:
The philosopher is someone whose desire and ambition are
absolutely mad; the desire for power of the greatest politicians
is absolutely miniscule and juvenile compared to the desire of
the philosopher who, in a philosophical work, manifests both
a design on mastery and a renunciation of mastery on a scale
and to a degree that I fi nd infi nitely more powerful than can
be found elsewhere [.. .]. There is an adventure of power and
unpower, a play of potence and impotence, a size of desire that
seems to me, with the philosophers, much more impressive
than elsewhere. It is out of all proportion with other types of
discourse, and sometimes even with all the rules of art.^73