[Reader-list] last on Derrida

[Vivek Narayanan]

>From the Village Voice-- a pretty charming, intriguing essay.

V.


The Essay
by *Leland de la Durantaye*
Of Spirit
The late, great Derrida's last lectures had a mysterious double in the crowd
November 16th, 2004 11:30 AM

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acques Derrida, the world's most famous philosopher, died of pancreatic 
cancer in a Paris hospital on October 8. He had long been shy of the 
spotlight. From 1962 to 1979 he refused to be photographed, relenting 
only when /Le Monde/ ran a photo of Michel Foucault with the caption 
"Jacques Derrida." Wary of iconization, he combined extreme discretion 
as regarded his private person and life, and extreme generosity as 
concerned teaching and lecturing. He spoke in dozens of countries on 
hundreds of occasions on topics from Plato to phenomenology, Heidegger 
to hospitality, Descartes to deconstruction. He gave lectures in support 
of political causes such as the anti-apartheid movement, the rights of 
Algerian immigrants, and the plight of Czech dissidents, and he gave 
other lectures simply because he was invited. A telling (if apocryphal) 
Kansas appearance: An audience member stood up and recounted the scene 
from /The Wizard of Oz/ in which Dorothy and her friends finally meet 
the wizard, who is powerful and overwhelming until Toto pulls away the 
curtain to reveal a very small man. "Professor Derrida, are you like 
that?" the audience member asked. Derrida paused before replying, "You 
mean like the dog?"

Appearances notwithstanding, this was no joke—or at least not merely 
one. The image of Derrida that readers often had was that of a 
wizard—wonderful or not—booming from behind an imposing curtain of works 
and words. But to himself, he was far more like the dog. The 
philosophical vocation that he adopted and advocated was a classical 
one—that of tugging at the loose ends of accepted truths, of taking hold 
of the curtains of metaphysical, linguistic, and political certainty, 
and pulling.

I arrived very early at the gated building in the center of Paris where 
Derrida taught in his last years. If I arrived early enough, I saw the 
following. Hours before the lecture was scheduled to begin, the first 
group of auditors arrived: the misinformed. They had heard, as once had 
I, that they needed to arrive wildly early to secure a seat—which was 
untrue. They would look about the near-empty auditorium, suspecting they 
were in the wrong room, before resigning themselves to wait and 
producing passionately tattered copies of Derrida's /Of Grammatology/ in 
one of the many languages into which it had been grammatologized. 
Foreign emissaries continued to trickle in for another half-hour, and 
then the first major domestic detachments began to arrive.

Familiar faces appeared. An hour and 15 minutes before the lecture, the 
most unusual of Derrida's usual suspects—his giant double—would arrive. 
It was said that he hadn't missed a lecture in decades. Upon entering, 
he would cast such a fierce, "deconstructing" glance—as a woman sitting 
behind me once called it—that the room grew still. After scanning the 
crowd for we never knew what, he mounted heavily to his accustomed seat 
on the left side of the auditorium, which we unkindly called "the 
lunatic fringe." I would always make a point of asking whoever happened 
to be sitting next to me who this man was, and heard that he was a 
psychoanalyst, a pharmacist, an oceanographer, a madman; that he was 
Derrida's brother, his barber; that he was Derrida himself.

As his auditors knew, Derrida was a master of conceptual disguise. His 
lectures typically followed a winding path. He would begin with a 
paradox, or just some very weird statement ("Speech is speechless," 
"Nietzsche's umbrella was no ordinary umbrella"), and once he had his 
audience's attention, would gradually and gracefully guide the paradox 
from deep space to inner space, from nonsense to sense. Derrida's 
pharmacist, or whatever he was, would ask a question at the end of 
nearly every one of these lectures. The question would be a mirror image 
of what we had just heard. It would begin with sense—good, sound, 
irrefutable sense—and then veer eerily away, grading from question to 
statement, statement to rant, rant to raving, sense to nonsense. At some 
point he would be cut off by either an impatient audience, or a patient 
Derrida. The effect was so curious that during my first weeks I was sure 
the two were working in concert in the interest of greater 
deconstruction. To this day I am not certain.

A group of elegant women invariably sat in the front row. They were 
often warmly dressed and, to the wonderment of the auditorium, would 
remain so even through the "sultry" period of the lecture when, after 
roughly an hour, overcrowding and poor ventilation would send 
temperatures soaring and induce light-headedness in listeners sitting in 
the upper reaches of the vertiginous auditorium. Various theories 
reigned as to how the elegant women kept cool. A man in the seat next to 
me (himself clad from head to foot in leather) speculated that as 
Derrida's thought operated according to special "magnetic principles," 
and as "weather is essentially magnetism," temperatures very near 
Derrida's body might be much different than those, say, 20 feet away. I 
changed seats.

Magnetism and leather were important elements in these lectures. Derrida 
provided the magnetism, and his audience the leather. Paris boasted a 
rich variety of lectures and seminars offered by erudite and even 
charismatic teachers. But none drew such varied crowds as Derrida's. 
Many were what one expected in a lecture course given by a 
world-renowned philosopher: learned men and women with a stake in 
philosophy and its discontents. Many, like myself, had traveled long 
distances to be there. But just as one found precise phenomenologists 
with conceptual apparatuses that could abstract you from everyday 
experience in the blink of an eye, one also found there ardent 
cabalists, languorous dilettantes, renegade psychoanalysts, celebrated 
poets, and journeyman plumbers.

Forty-five minutes before the lecture was scheduled to begin, two film 
crews set up shop. Then came the students en masse, making pit stops at 
the still-unoccupied lectern to place recording devices of varying 
shapes, sizes, and vintages. (One—there every week—was so large and 
bulky it looked like the phones used in World War II films.) By 4:45 no 
seats were left; students had staked out both the aisles. By 4:50, the 
room was a fire marshal's nightmare. By 4:55, auditors had camped out on 
every bit of available floor space around the podium. At 5:00, he arrived.

He was never noticeably nervous, and he was always markedly 
businesslike. In his efforts to procure a still-larger auditorium he 
would pass around a book for everyone to sign—which would take over half 
an hour to run its course. He had on every occasion a lot of material he 
wished to present and spared us avuncular anecdotes not rare in Parisian 
philosophy seminars, in which the speaker fondly recalled the time he 
and Sartre didn't put too fine a point on it. Derrida's lectures were 
meticulously prepared and dynamically read. More surprising, they were 
funny. The steep roads of his thought were not always easy to follow, 
but they were, even at their most recondite, riveting—not just for the 
conceptual strength and linguistic agility of the speaker, but also for 
the way that he would pounce on new ideas as if they were scurrying 
about at his feet, and for the excited pitch his voice would reach when 
he had at last got hold of them.

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In the early years of the 20th century, members of Paris's cultural 
elite would send away a servant every Friday afternoon on a special 
mission. After traversing the bustling city, the servants would convene 
in the main auditorium of a large gated building in the center of Paris. 
There they would wait. A few hours later, their employers would come and 
take their places. And then a small man with piercing eyes and an 
amicable smile would enter the auditorium: the most famous philosopher 
in the world, Henri Bergson. Bergson's friend William James once said of 
hearing him speak that "it is like the breath of the morning and the 
song of the birds." This was, however, not the only note heard by 
intellectuals of the day. T.S. Eliot went to no small pains to 
energetically denounce the "epidemic" that was "Bergsonism." The popular 
Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck suggested that Bergson was quite 
simply "the most dangerous man in the world." The influential French 
author Julien Benda declared that he would willingly kill him if he 
thought death would limit his influence.

Just as the most famous philosopher in the world during the opening 
decades of the 20th century was a small, handsome, Jewish Frenchman 
criticized for a philosophy with "irrational" elements, so too was the 
most famous philosopher of its closing decades. During the years when 
his books and person made their mysterious mark upon my life, Derrida 
was often denounced as a dangerous man and his thought as a nihilistic 
epidemic. But we who gathered together to hear him speak could not 
square this threat with the bright-eyed man with the birdlike voice who 
stood before us.

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/Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and 
American literature and language at Harvard University/.