In Life and in Death 2003–2004 529
he let me give him a massage. But when I mentioned meditation
to him, he said that the only meditations he knew were those of
Descartes and Husserl.’^33
Now that Derrida could no longer barely write, the spoken word,
already such a signifi cant feature in his life, became increasingly
important. When Jean Birnbaum, who had done several interviews
with him for France-Culture before moving to Le Monde, sug-
gested they discuss his most recent works at the Musée d’Art et
d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Derrida could not stop himself agreeing.
But on the evening of 12 February, in front a packed audience, his
fatigue was so obvious that he had to bring his illness out into the
open. He was able to disguise it even less a few weeks later, in the
very politically infl ected interview he gave to Les Inrockuptibles:
on 31 March, the weekly journal gave over eleven pages to him, as
well as its cover, hailing in warm terms ‘the commitments of a great
intellectual’.^34 Shortly thereafter, at the request of Edwy Plenel,
then in charge of the editorial board of Le Monde, Birnbaum went
to Ris-Orangis to interview Derrida at length: it would occupy a
double-page spread, something now quite exceptional. This was a
matter of some importance and Derrida asked for a little time to
review the text in detail.
While his relations with Le Monde had always been somewhat
ambivalent, he was a great admirer of the monthly Le Monde diplo-
matique, a sister publication of the daily Le Monde, though one with
a completely independent editorial set-up. On 8 May 2004, on that
monthly’s fi ftieth anniversary, Derrida agreed to appear on stage at
the Palais des Sports in Paris, to pay homage to what he called ‘the
most remarkable and ambitious journalistic venture of the past half-
century, in other words [his] whole life as an adult and a citizen’. He
used the opportunity to summarize his political convictions as they
had stood since 11 September and the war in Iraq.
I’m not considered to be a Eurocentric philosopher. For the
past forty years, I’ve probably more often been accused of the
opposite. But I think that, without any Eurocentric illusions or
pretensions, without the least European nationalism, and even
without all that much confi dence in Europe as it is, or seems to
be evolving, we need to struggle on behalf of what this name
represents today, with the memory of the Enlightenment, to
be sure, but also with the guilty conscience, fully accepted, of
the totalitarian, genocidal, and colonialist crimes of the past.
Thus we need to struggle for the irreplaceable things that
Europe must keep in the world to come, so that it will become
more than a single market or currency, more than a neo-
nationalist conglomerate, more than a new armed force, even