In Life and in Death 2003–2004 533
I would call, drawing inspiration from the name given to an
old synagogue in Prague, the ‘old new Europe’, Staronova
synagoga, a Europe that keeps its memory, its good and its bad
memory, bright and dark. [.. .]
My hope is that, on the basis of your two memories, and
especially the awakening of conscience and the repentance
that followed your ‘nocturnal memory’, you, my new ‘Old
Europe’, are starting down a path that you alone are able to
follow today, between American hegemonism – which does
not even respect the international law it claims to uphold –,
fundamentalist theocracy, and China, which is already starting
to become, if we take into consideration just the question of
petrol, defi ning in the geopolitical lines of force of the present
time.^38A few days later, Jacques and Marguerite Derrida set off for
Meina, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, to the Drawing Academy
founded by Valerio Adami. Now he could rest, in a region he had
always loved, with very dear friends; it was here that he celebrated
his seventy-fourth birthday. But there was also a conference on
a theme chosen that summer by Édouard Glissant: ‘How Not to
Tremble’. In a more accessible language than ever, Derrida drew a
comparison between his memory of trembling as a child, during the
winter of 1942, as Algiers was being bombed, and the trembling of
the hand from which he had been suff ering for some time, and which
now stopped him writing and even signing documents. This was the
springboard to a meditation on the fault, the fault-line, and failure:
We should not pretend to know what trembling means, to
know what it means really to tremble, since trembling will
always remain heterogeneous to knowledge. [.. .] The thought
of trembling is a singular experience of non-knowing. [.. .] The
experience of trembling is always the experience of an absolute
passivity, absolutely exposed, absolutely vulnerable, passive
in the face of an irreversible past as well as in the face of an
unpredictable future.
Shuddering can, to be sure, be a demonstration of fear,
anxiety, the apprehension of death, when one shudders in
advance at the idea of what is going to happen. But it can be
light, on the surface of the skin, when shuddering announces
pleasure or ecstasy. [.. .] Water, they tell us, shudders before it
boils, which is what we called seduction.^39The conclusion was like a fi nal salute to his friends Camilla and
Valerio Adami: ‘The artist is someone who becomes an artist only
when his hand trembles, in other words when he basically does not