9 The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002
In January 2000, a new, important book came out under the Galilée
imprint: Derrida’s On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. It was, fi rst and
foremost, an imposing object: far from all the traditional norms of
a philosophical work, it was 350 pages long, in square format, with
several typographical variations; and the text was accompanied by
a series of images by Simon Hantaï, described as ‘works of reading’
(travaux de lecture). As often when it came to a diffi cult book,
Michel Delorme was also relying on bibliophiles, and the original
edition of 129 copies was accompanied by an engraving.
A fi rst, much shorter version of this text had appeared in the
United States in 1992, in a special issue of the review Paragraph, on
the initiative of Peggy Kamuf, but the main part of the work was
composed between September 1998 and September 1999. It was
during his trip to Oceania, in a hotel bedroom in Melbourne, that
Derrida completed the fi nal revisions.
The work’s strange title might have put off some potential readers
by implying that a good knowledge of Nancy’s work would be
ne cessary. Of course, Derrida had mainly wished to ‘sketch out a
fi rst movement’ to celebrate Jean-Luc Nancy, the man and, more
especially, the ‘major event’ that his work represented.^1 But through
the author of L’Intrus, Derrida was going back to a phenomenologi-
cal approach that he had long since neglected, around a thread and a
title, On Touching, that had constantly worried him even when they
seemed inevitable. So there were in fact two books in one here. And
probably more than that, as Derrida acknowledges in the insert.
Firstly, a heterogeneous composition. Some will judge it, if
they insist on using these categories, baroque or romantic
(philosophy that never renounces anything + canonical history
of philosophy + planned system + table of categories – but also
fi ction + phantasm + narration + biography + parentheses +
digressions + confi dences + private correspondence + unkept
promises).^2