490 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
unable to say ‘no’, to draw on the store of the ‘no’ that I have
always cultivated.
Never have I been so passive, basically, never have I let
people do with me as they wished, direct me, to such an extent.
How did I let myself be taken by surprise, to this extent, so
unwisely? After all, right from the start, I have been or at least I
think I have been, very wary, and I warn people that I am very
wary, – of this situation of imprudence or improvidence (the
photograph, the improvised interview, the impromptu remark,
the movie camera, the microphone, the public space itself,
etc.).^35Over the next few years, Safaa Fathy continued to fi lm Derrida
on several occasions, at conferences or public events, trying to
compose an audiovisual memory to complement the archives at
Irvine. She became a permanent presence, following the philosopher
like a shadow, even though this irritated many of his friends. It was
as if his relationship to the image had fi nally been reversed, as if,
from a radical rejection of photography, Derrida had shifted to an
almost uninterrupted video recording, a multiplicity of traces that
was no doubt another form of eff acement.
Travels, images... As these proliferated, so did his publications.
What Derrida really liked about Galilée was the way it enabled him
to publish as fast as he wanted. Big books, sometimes, but often
smaller volumes containing just a lecture or two. He was happy with
this kind of fragmentation. He had long been convinced that it was
no longer possible to construct ‘a big philosophical machine’; he
preferred to proceed by a series of ‘oblique little essays’. Faced with
the philosophical concepts of the tradition, he felt ‘like a fl y who
has sensed danger’, he said one day during a debate with Jean-Luc
Nancy. ‘My instinct has always been to fl ee, as if, at fi rst contact,
just by naming these concepts, I was going to fi nd myself, like the fl y,
with my legs trapped in glue: captive, paralysed, a hostage, trapped
by a programme.’^36
Derrida felt and saw himself more and more as a writer, and his
thinking was less and less separable from its utterance. Though he
was one of the most-translated French authors in the world, he was
fi rst and foremost a man who celebrated the genius of a language
for which he confessed he had ‘an anxious, jealous, tormented
love’. Comparing his feeling with the more tranquil attitudes of
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Deleuze, he explained in his dialogues
with Élisabeth Roudinesco that he felt that everything he tried to
do involved ‘a hand-to-hand struggle with the French language, a
turbulent but primal hand-to-hand struggle’. ‘I would dare to claim
that between the French language and me [.. .], there will have been