At the Frontiers of the Institution 1991–1992 443
his work. There were photos everywhere, including private
or purely anecdotal images. I have to confess that I was
disappointed.^11In many respects, it can be said that Derrida’s career as a teacher
was to invent an audience that would suit him, listeners who would
come to hear him and to whom he could talk the way he wanted,
irrespective of any syllabus and any of the constraints imposed by
exams. At the Sorbonne, he was already a bit freer than at the lycée
in Le Mans. At the École des Hautes Études, he was much freer than
at Normale Sup. Over the years, he increasingly gave himself per-
mission to enjoy this situation to the full, without needing any alibis.
Derrida gave his seminars on Wednesdays, between 5 p.m.
and 7 p.m., the timetable that he had had at the École Normale.
He arrived with an old satchel full of books and folders, and he
arranged the sheets of paper and the volumes he would need with
meticulous care in front of him. In fact, he continued to write his
discourse from the fi rst word to the last, before ‘vocalizing’ it in the
lecture hall, as he improvised.
He had the gift of capturing his audience’s attention immediately,
in a way sometimes reminiscent of Lacan:
This will be, as usual, as will have been, inevitably, as all my
seminars should have been, a short treatise on love. And please
do not think that in announcing that I am going to speak to
you about love, I am yielding to any demagogy. Given the way
I will without delay be speaking of it, I fear that it’s more likely
that those who have come for a serenade will make a quick exit
rather than stay on.^12One diffi culty, of which he was fully aware, was that he needed
simultaneously to address the faithful, probably the majority of his
listeners, while also giving those who were coming for the fi rst time
a way in. For every ‘prologue’ was also an ‘epilogue’, and every new
seminar continued where the previous one had left off :
As is the case every year, I have to do the impossible: begin
again. Continue to begin, repeat what was said and repeat the
new departure. Take up the thread of a seminar where it was
broken off , and that is always too soon, to carry on, to what
still needs to be done, and it is always too much, the rest of the
rest still to be done. But at the same time as I begin again, I
have to begin for those among you who weren’t there last year,
or the previous years, since it is in fact the same seminar that
has been moving slowly and continuously along for at least six