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128 7 Salut-ations Between Derrida and Nancy Chapeau! I doff my cap, I take my hat off to you. How else to remember and commemorate a great thinker who touched us so, a thinker whom we knew, without knowing, as a living force, a thinker whom we observed from a distance mourn and watch over the work of friends and colleagues? How else than to pay our respects, to salute him, or raise our hat to him? For one must begin by saluting the other, by addressing a greeting to the other, as there is a salut at each moment of encounter or leave-taking, at every meeting or parting, at every beginning and end. Salut! It is necessary to seize this occasion not only to memorialize, to remember , to pay homage or tribute to Jacques Derrida, not simply to express one’s admiration, but also to hail an extraordinary philosopher, to salute him. This act of saluting, what in French is “donner un coup de chapeau” or “tirer son chapeau à quelqu’un,” would be a mark of one’s respect. Yet this salutation would not dare to confer, as every salut usually does, health or eternal life on its recipient. For the would-be recipient of this particular salut did everything he could in his last writings to disabuse us of any hope for immunity, safety, and salvation. I began by citing, quoting from a portion of a text itself discussing another chief, “capital text on the hat [un texte capital sur le chapeau].”1 There, the word “chapeau” is cited without an exclamation mark, depriving it of any connotation of praising, congratulating, or saying bravo. Between Derrida and Nancy ■ 129 Jacques Derrida refers to a hat and a crown in his essay on Gérard Granel, “Corona vitae (fragments),” published alongside texts on other friends and colleagues in Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde.2 Written in the form of a letter to Jean-Luc Nancy, the coeditor of a collection dedicated to Granel, who was Nancy’s teacher, Derrida’s essay cites an article written by Granel entitled “Ludwig Wittgenstein ou le refus de la couronne.” In a discussion of the relation between religion and logic, Granel notes that Wittgenstein’s ultimate attitude toward all things religious remained that of “tirer son chapeau” (taking his hat off) as a mark of respect.3 This is recourse neither to religion nor to a religiosity without positive religion but, Granel explains with another hat-related expression, that of “mettre son chapeau sur la tête” (putting one’s hat on one’s own head), which each person can only do for oneself (EL 32). In other words, for each person, it is a matter of thinking in the manner that only he has the ability to do, in the manner best suited to him. Granel is alluding to a fragment in a collection of Wittgenstein’s notes, translated by Granel himself into French, in which Wittgenstein claims that no one is able to think for another. The fragment reads: “No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.”4 Granel renders this in French as: “Personne ne peut former une idée à ma place, de même que personne ne peut mettre mon chapeau sur la tête.”To each his own hat or head, then. Cut to a scene at Jacques Derrida’s birthday celebration at the château in Cerisy-la-Salle. On a beautiful summer day, scholars from across the world are gathered in the courtyard around a birthday cake celebrating the seventy-second birthday of a man of enormous vitality whom they have witnessed over a number of days bounding up and down the stairs of the château with a spring in every step, attending every session and commenting on every paper. Derrida has been in great spirits all day, laughing and joking. While standing next to Derrida, who is smoking, Jean-Luc Nancy teasingly raises his arm and feigns to put his hat, the fedora (chapeau mou) that he’s been known to wear quite often, on Derrida’s head. Like a halo or a crown, the hat rests in the air for a moment. Derrida, annoyed somewhat, moves his head to the side to try to prevent Nancy from placing his hat on his head. The hat touches his hair. Derrida immediately reacts, runs his hand through his ruffled hair...

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