480 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
‘He’s managed to get people to accept that they need to be patient
when he can’t fi nd his words. [.. .] There’s someone who has suc-
ceeded in transforming the public scene and forcing it to go at his
own speed.’^7
Two months later, a whole programme was devoted to Derrida,
in Laure Adler’s Cercle de minuit. Apart from his short and unhappy
appearance on Arte, with Salman Rushdie and Pierre Bourdieu, this
was the fi rst time Derrida had spoken on French television since
his return from Prague, on 2 January 1982. If he had said yes to
Laure Adler, this was because he knew and admired her, and was
able to discuss with her how the face-to-face discussion would go,
in surroundings of the greatest sobriety. Françoise Giroud wrote
appreciatively about the programme in her column in the Nouvel
Observateur, while deploring its timing:
Jacques Derrida at 1 a.m., what a waste! Laure Adler will allow
us to say that much. Her Cercle de minuit is often interesting,
but her audience is inevitably restricted. And so, off ering then
Derrida to watch... Someone we never see, someone who
never speaks... So the most famous, outside France, of French
philosophers had agreed to make an exception and put in an
appearance. It was pure magic! A completely new freedom of
expression, a fresh style of thinking, new paths boldly opened
up... I’ve never seen anything like it before. Superb.^8However, it would be several years before the experience was
repeated. In Echographies of Television, the transcription of fi lmed
interviews made three years earlier with Bernard Stiegler, Derrida
insisted on the modifi cations that television imposes structurally on
the words of writers and intellectuals:
As soon as someone says ‘Roll tape!’ a race begins, one starts
not to speak, not to think in the same way anymore, almost not
to think at all anymore... One’s relation to words, to their way
or coming or not coming, is diff erent, you know this well. [.. .]
Maybe intellectuals who appear on television all the time are
better able to forget the eff ects of this artifi ciality which I, for
one, am having such a hard time with here. I say this under the
heading of process and of stasis, of the arrest, the halt. When
the process of recording begins, I am inhibited, paralyzed,
arrested, I ‘don’t get anywhere’ [je fais du ‘sur-place’] and I
don’t think, I don’t speak in the way I do when I’m not in this
situation.^9There was an interesting coincidence in the fact that, at the end
of 1996, at the same time as Echographies of Television, Pierre