In Life and in Death 2003–2004 527
Derrida in the ‘Journal de la semaine’, the column that Libération
had asked him to write:
It’s an irresistible feeling of friendship that brings me back to
my old master in Comédie. [.. .] You close your books. You
close your eyes. They are the ones you can hear. [.. .] The whole
spirit of the epoch is there. The bereavement of a generation.
It is like a divine comedy whose bit parts have been reduced to
the state, not of shades, but of voices, in a series of concentric
regions in which Derrida plays the part of Virgil.^26Paul Ricoeur had been moved to tears on learning of Derrida’s
illness. The bonds between the two men had become stronger since the
death of Levinas. In December 2002, they conducted a dialogue at the
Maison de l’Amérique Latine on the theme: ‘How can we talk about
the other?’ This question lay at the heart of their preoccupations, but
also of the long story of their relationship. ‘I have talent. Derrida has
genius,’ Ricoeur sometimes said to his friends. In a late letter to his
former assistant, he admitted that he ‘still regretted the unfortunate
critique’ of Derrida’s work in The Rule of Metaphor, before adding:
‘You deftly picked it out and brilliantly lifted it up.’^27 On learning of
the seriousness of his state, Ricoeur wrote to Derrida how precious
his life and thought were to him: ‘I have kept my admiration for your
work too silent, and, if you allow me, my friendship, which I have
always thought found an echo in you. Je vous embrasse.’^28
Just as generous was the way that, in December 2003, Derrida
devoted one of his last texts to Ricoeur:
Without even admitting, sincerely, to a sense of incompetence,
I believe that my strength will never have failed me as much as
it does when tackling, in the form of a study or a philosophical
discussion, the immense work of Paul Ricoeur. [.. .] On reread-
ing what I have just spontaneously written (‘diffi cult, even
impossible’), I smile. As I belatedly notice, these two words
were, over the last two years, at the centre of a debate between
Paul Ricoeur and myself, on evil and forgiveness.^29Derrida pondered the ‘strange logic of this exchange without agree-
ment or opposition’, in which ‘the encounter is sketched but also
scotched’ (une rencontre ‘s’esquisse mais aussi s’esquive’).
We ‘rubbed shoulders’, he told me one day, when we were
yet again trying to think together about what had happened,
hadn’t happened, a whole life long, between us. [.. .] Under or
across an uncrossable abyss that we didn’t manage to name, we
can nonetheless speak to and hear one another.