The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 499
the grand amphithéâtre of the Sorbonne, in front of over a thou-
sand analysts from the whole world, he tackled this fundamental
question: why is man the only being to enjoy evil for evil’s sake?
Extending Freud’s refl ections on the death drive, Derrida called
psychoanalysis ‘the only discourse which at present can claim the
phenomenon of psychic cruelty as its own domain’.^8
Psychoanalysis would be the name of what, without any
theological or other alibi, turns towards what is most proper
to psychic cruelty [.. .]. Wherever a question of suff ering for
suff ering, of doing evil or allowing it to be done for the sake of
evil, in short, wherever the question of radical evil or of an evil
worse than radical evil is no longer abandoned to religion or
to metaphysics, no other discipline [savoir] is prepared to take
an interest in something like cruelty – except for what is called
psychoanalysis....^9In Derrida’s view, psychoanalysis ‘has not yet tried, and so even
less succeeded in, the task of thinking, penetrating, and changing the
axioms of the ethical, the juridical, and the political’.^10 He would like
to assign new roles to it, going beyond the treatment of individual
suff ering, if it wishes to preserve any theoretical relevance in a world
that is no longer Freud’s. Derrida is convinced: the ‘Enlightenment
to come’ should take the logic of the unconscious into account.
This involves, for example, answering a question that in his view is
essential and yet rarely asked: ‘Why does psychoanalysis never take
root in the vast territory of Arabo-Islamic culture?’^11 All these ques-
tions would seem even more urgent in the wake of 11 September the
following year.
A more personal question was now bothering him. Jacques had
never much liked birthdays. But his seventieth birthday, on 15
July 2000, bugged him even more. He was prone to moments of
depression and, contrary to his usual habits, took a great deal of
Lexomil.12* On 1 September, he confi ded in Max Genève: ‘I’m
more than ever obsessed by age and the longing to “grow less old”.
[.. .] You’ll see, being seventy is hell.’^13 Nonetheless, he still went
swimming in the Mediterranean for hours on end.
This birthday rekindled Jacques’s anxieties over his archives.
Many of them had already been deposited in Irvine, but he some-
times regretted that he was leaving nothing in France. The IMEC
- Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine – is an associa-
tion set up in 1988 on the initiative of scholars and members of the
- A sedative, also known as bromazepan. – Tr.