The event had united to creative thinkers, who’s passion for literature would fire up the discussions in the years to come. ‘For me there are not many philosophers like Derrida. Prior to meeting him I had read his work a lot, but obviously later he began to write more between philosophy and literature, a lot of his interest in literature was developing. He liked how I interpreted texts that I wrote about. I took a lot of those texts which specifically had as subject the relationship between art and philosophy. He would ask that I be invited when there was an international conference about his work. That was a chance to really work with him, because at those conferences we were in discussion for days at the time. We would talk endlessly about literature and philosophy. We can’t make literature without making philosophy, on the contrary, philosophy is literature, that is my conviction.’

As an author Calle-Gruber was even empowered by Derrida’s thinking: ‘Derrida gives me the right to decide, to invent, to create. Writing is very dynamic with him. It is the way his work takes the language, the way it gives you the tools to do the same yourself. He makes you really conscious of the text as language. Almost always can Derrida show you a new way of interpretation of a text. He gives you tools for interpretation and he lets you see that interpretation is literature, philosophy and art. The interpretation is already present in the writing process. It really changes your view when you become aware of that. In that sense his relationship with the language is very constitutive of the person who is writing. For myself, it has had a tremendous impact in my way of thinking, writing and of sharing with others like my students for example. I spoke today about literature. I wanted to show how Derrida can make you look differently towards literature. It is not literature, it is first language. Language is forming our relationship with literature and philosophy’,  and it is not just what forms that relationship, it forms all our relationships. Seeing language as the lubricant or the divide between the subject and any object, is therefore the key to understanding Derrida’s work. ‘All of his contributions are coming down to the same thing; when you bring a question to Derrida, he begins questioning the question. Asking that question is always the gesture, that we do without thinking about it. That is for me the most important thing. He always says: you show me that, I’m not only looking at that, but also at the finger that is pointing me towards that. That is so important. That is what we have to do for ourselves, we don’t do that enough, we don’t ask ourselves enough what are we doing while we are writing or reading, not why but what. We always have this blindness, because we are so concentrated on doing it, that we forget to think about the event of doing it at the same time. It all becomes what it is in language.’