444 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
years, with the changes of title (‘Nationality and philosophical
nationalism’, ‘Kant, the Jew, the German’, ‘Politics of friend-
ship’, ‘Loving-eating-the other’, etc.) being mere metonyms for
the same preoccupation, the same focus for questions in which
things have not yet been brought to completion.^13Yves Charnet, only just twenty when he fi rst came to hear
Derrida, has described to perfection the way he was dazzled:
That voice gently started to weave its spell – on each of the
fervent women and each of the captivated men listening –, a
spell that would remain, for me, as it were, the signature tune
of that shaman of thought. Jacques Derrida would never cease
to turn, for the two hours that each memorable session lasted,
to turn around his thought. And yes, to make thought turn.
American men and women, Japanese men and women, German
men and women, young people from all over the globalized
world composed that impressive and enthralled audience. [.. .]
I must insist on the element of personal beauty, of individual
splendour, which [.. .] contributed to the lightning-bolt eff ect
of those words whose poetic energy pierced us. That way of
centring the pedagogic space on a body – a body involved in the
act of teaching to such an extent that pupils had the physical
impression of living through a passion of the word.^14Over the years, Derrida’s discourse had freed itself from all
academic rhetoric. Indeed, he would often treat the philosoph-
ical tradition in a zigzag way, indulging in several digressions. In
‘Answering the secret’, in 1991–2, he focused especially on Bartleby
the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, but he also referred to ‘The
fi gure in the carpet’ by Henry James, Raymond Roussel by Michel
Foucault, Clé by Annie Leclerc, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the
Book of Job, and the Gospel According to Saint Matthew – not
to mention Freud, Heidegger, and Patočka. The two following
years were devoted to bearing witness, and Derrida took in works
by Kierkegaard, Proust, Celan, Blanchot, and Lyotard, with more
unexpected excurses into Hugo, Hemingway, Antonioni’s Blow-Up,
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, and the trial of Rodney King in Los
Angeles.
The seminar was his laboratory, an opportunity for him to
prepare and test out his new ideas. He began to explore paths that he
would follow in his books or his major lectures. But the seminar was
also a privileged moment, in which his words could be free, fulfi lled,
sovereign. Françoise Dastur puts it very well: ‘Throughout the years
when I followed his seminar, between 1987 and 1994, I also watched
as something rare took place: a set of ideas coming into being, and