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Conclusion: The World Over
- Fordham University Press
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Conclusion The World Over How could one not think the world of him—especially here, at this gathering , so soon after his death, at the annual meeting of an organization, SPEP, where so many of us will have been in one way or another influenced by his thought, educated by his writing, inspired by his presence, touched by his generosity, graced by his hospitality, or blessed by his friendship?1 How could one not think the world of him, especially here, where almost any one of us could have been honored, as we three have been honored, to speak this evening of his extraordinary life, work, and legacy, where almost any one of us could have borne witness to the genuine chance of reading one of his essays or books at a critical moment in our education, of receiving a gracious or encouraging letter penned by his hand, or of attending one of his seminars at the École Normale Supérieure or École des Hautes Études, where students from around the world came to study with him and to bear away with and within them not simply a teaching but an ethos and a voice, a masterly and yet always inviting, hospitable voice—a voice I once heard say innumerable times during the academic year 1988–89, and many times within me since then, even if, I must confess, it sounds so very different today: O mes amis, il n’y a nul ami, that is, O my friends, there is no friend. How could you not think the world of him, and I say ‘‘him’’ here not just because I no longer know precisely what this proper name refers to today, but because of the heartbreak I feel each time I pronounce the name ‘‘Jacques Derrida,’’ heartbreak at the way it now oscillates between 227 the signature of an incomparably rich and varied corpus that will be read and reread long into the future, with more than seventy books, translated into innumerable languages, and many more, we can be sure, to come, a corpus we have genuine cause to celebrate today, a corpus with indisputably seminal texts on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin , Levinas, but also Joyce, Ponge, Celan, and Blanchot, and the list goes on and on, a name that oscillates between a signature for all that and the proper name of a mentor and friend we will never see again, a teacher who, as he taught us, speaks now only in us, a name for what has gone irremediably from our lives, from our world, without any hope of resurrection or redemption. Three weeks after his death, it is still uncertain, and will be for some time, whether the surest sign of fidelity is to praise the person or his work, to speak out of appreciation and celebration or sadness and sorrow, to reread and rethink something in that enormous corpus that remains still so unknown to us or else to recall more private moments, to share among us the memories we each have of him. Since he himself often gave in to the desire or perhaps even need to speak of the dead friend in mourning by recalling not only public deeds but private moments or personal anecdotes , I feel emboldened to recount here just two among so many other possible ones. The first dates back to 1996, to October 7, 1996, to be precise, during a conference organized by my colleague David Krell at DePaul University on the topic mourning and politics in Derrida’s work. At an informal luncheon with Derrida during that conference, another friend and colleague, Peg Birmingham, told us all the funny story of how her daughter, then three, had appropriated and made her own the story she had heard from a family member of how they had recently been in a roll-over car accident and found themselves, fortunately unhurt, suspended from above by their seat belts. A couple of days after hearing the story, Peg’s daughter said with conviction and insistence, ‘‘Mom, remember that time we were in a car accident and I was hanging from the roof of the car in my car seat?’’ Peg laughed, and we all laughed, at the obvious moral of the story—kids say the darndest things and you better be careful what you say around them. But Jacques, with a bit of a mischievous smile, turned to Peg and...