Remembering Derrida

I.

I both read and met Jacques Derrida in 1966, and immediately judged him to be a thinker of great importance. I was also among the first to write about him in the Rivista di Estetica (1966 no. 3), in an article entitled “Grammatology and Aesthetics.” De la Grammatologie would come out the following year, but I had read and studied the essay (published in two parts in Critique, December 1965 and January 1966), which anticipated the central thesis of the work. During this period, he and I used to meet at the café “Aux Deux Magots” in St-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. He was unhappy for many reasons. He felt both underappreciated by the philosophical establishment, and behind in his academic career. What is more, he was aggrieved that Critique hadsold only 3,000 copies. I remember a man who was very angry with the world. I, too, shared this sentiment, but the fact of being eleven years younger than he allowed me to feel part of the wave of student protests which, coming from the United States, had reached France.

The events of 1968 separated us, but I continued to read his work in a systematic manner, and indeed to receive from him affectionately dedicated copies of his publications until 1972. His influence on my thinking grew significantly during the 1970s and ’80s, as is evident in my books Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World, (New York: Humanity Books 2001), Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (Continuum: London-New York 2004) and Art and its Shadow (Continuum: London-New York 2004). In particular, the central ideas of “ritual without content” and “inorganic sexuality” may be seen as developments of Derrida’s polemic against logocentrism and vitalism.