hundred Jews were killed by Arab mobs in November 1945
(Atlas 93 ). Years later, he recalled, “Even for a child who was
unable to analyze things, it was clear that it would all end in
fire and blood. No one could escape that violence and that
fear” (Points 120 ).
Derrida was growing up in an environment full of vio-
lent upheaval. He responded by throwing himself into books:
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary
Walker,Chateaubriand’s René,and the novels of André Gide
(Counterpath 27 ). (He also kept a silkworm collection, a pecu-
liar, delicate hobby that rewarded the young Derrida with a
burst of color when the cocoons were stained blood-red and
the moths emerged [Veils 87 – 91 ].) In an interview, Derrida re-
membered how he first “got into” literature and philosophy.
“Very early I read Gide, Nietzsche, Valéry, in ninth or tenth
grade.” He especially loved Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres
(Earthly Nourishment): “I would have learned this book by
heart if I could have. No doubt, like every adolescent, I ad-
mired its fervor, the lyricism of its declarations of war on reli-
gion and families....For me it was a manifesto or Bible: at
once religious and neo-Nietzschean, sensualist, immoralist,
and especially very Algerian” (Points 341 – 42 ). Gide’s book is
headlong, rhapsodic; it breathes an air of youthful ardor, a de-
sire to experience all of life in its fullness, virtues as well as
vices. Suffused with the atmosphere of North Africa, the set-
ting ofLes nourritures terrestres,Gide’s characters praise the
earth: “Amorous beauty of the earth, the touch of your surface
is marvelous. O landscape where my desire sinks deep! Open
country where my pursuit strolls; path of papyrus that covers
the water; reeds bent over the river... I watched the spring
unfold.”^5 This was heady stufffor a sheltered, bookish teenager
like Derrida.
20 From Algeria to the École Normale