I'll Have to Wander All Alone by Jacques DerridaToo much to say, and I don't have the heart for it today. There is too much to say about what hashappened to us here, about what has also happened to me, with the death of Gilles Deleuze, witha death we no doubt feared (knowing him to be so ill), but still, with this death here (cette mort-ci),this unimaginable image, in the event, would deepen still further, if that were possible, the infinitesorrow of another event. Deleuze the thinker is, above all, the thinker of the event and always of this event here (cet evenement-ci ). He remained the thinker of the event from beginning to end. Ireread what he said of the event, already in 1969, in one of his most celebrated books, The Logicof Sense. He cites Joe Bousquet ("To my inclination for death," said Bousquet, "which was afailure of the will"), then continues: "From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certainrespect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of thewhole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly whatoccurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistentwith what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event. Itis in this sense that the Amor fatiis one with the struggle of free men" (One would have to quoteinterminably).There is too much to say, yes, about the time I was given, along with so many others of my"generation," to share with Deleuze; about the good fortune I had of thinking thanks to him, bythinking of him. Since the beginning, all of his books (but first of all Nietzsche, Difference andRepetition, The Logic of Sense ) have been for me not only, of course, provocations to think, but,each time, the unsettling, very unsettling experience - so unsettling - of a proximity or a near totalaffinity in the "theses" - if one may say this - through too evident distances in what I would call, for want of anything better, "gesture," "strategy," "manner": of writing, of speaking, perhaps of reading. As regards the "theses" (but the word doesn't fit) and particularly the thesis concerning adifference that is not reducible to dialectical opposition, a difference "more profound" than acontradiction (Difference and Repetition ), a difference in the joyfully repeated affirmation ("yes,yes"), the taking into account of the simulacrum, Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so manydissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this"generation." I never felt the slightest "objection" arise in me, not even a virtual one, against anyof his discourse, even if I did on occasion happen to grumble against this or that proposition inAnti-Oedipus (I told him about it one day when we were coming back together by car fromNanterre University, after a thesis defense on Spinoza) or perhaps against the idea thatphilosophy consists in "creating" concepts. One day, I would like to explain how such anagreement on philosophical "content" never excludes all these differences that still today I don'tknow how to name or situate. (Deleuze had accepted the idea of publishing, one day, a longimprovised conversation between us on this subject and then we had to wait, to wait too long.) Ionly know that these differences left room for nothing but friendship between us. To myknowledge, no shadow, no sign has ever indicated the contrary. Such a thing is so rare in themilieu that was ours that I wish to make note of it here at this moment. This friendship did notstem solely from the (otherwise telling) fact that we have the same enemies. We saw each other little, it is true, especially in the last years. But I can still hear the laugh of his voice, a little hoarse,tell me so many things that I love to remember down to the letter: "My best wishes, all my bestwishes," he whispered to me with a friendly irony the summer of 1955 in the courtyard of theSorbonne when I was in the middle of failing my agregation exam. Or else, with the samesolicitude of the elder: "It pains me to see you spending so much time on that institution (leCollege International de Philosophie). I would rather you wrote..." And then, I recall thememorable ten days of the Nietzsche colloquium at Cerisy, in 1972, and then so many, manyother moments that make me, no doubt along with Jean-Francois Lyotard (who was also there),feel quite alone, surviving and melancholy today in what is called with that terrible and somewhatfalse word, a "generation." Each death is unique, of course, and therefore unusual, but what canone say about the unusual when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to Deleuze, itmultiplies in this way in the same "generation," as in a series - and Deleuze was also thephilosopher of serial singuarity - all these uncommon endings?
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Derrida - I'Ll Have to Wander All Alone
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