bridge. At cocktail parties, people expressed real curiosity
about his research; genuine intellectual exchanges appeared
more possible than in France. His later popularity in the United
States seemed to be presaged, even before any of the books that
were to earn him such fame in the American academy.
The major event of Derrida’s year in America was un-
doubtedly his wedding to Marguerite Aucouturier, which took
place in Boston in June 1957. The marriage would last for
nearly fifty years, until Jacques Derrida’s death. The couple had
two sons, Pierre and Jean; a third son, Daniel, was born out of
wedlock to Derrida by Sylviane Agaçinski, a philosopher who
later became the wife of French prime minister Lionel Jospin.
(In the final interview before his death, Derrida expressed his
disdain for marital fidelity. Still stirring up trouble in his last
days, he complained that monogamy was “imposed upon Jews
by Europeans,” and that it is “neither Jewish nor, as is well
known, Muslim.”)^6
As a teenager in Algeria, Derrida had devoured Sartre’s
Nauseaand had seen his playNo Exit(Negotiations 264 , 277 ).
After his arrival in France, he read Sartre’s What Is Literature?
andSituations,two books that introduced him to many of the
writers he would care about most, including Francis Ponge,
Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille (Points 345 ). He was
later to find fault with Sartre, and to choose Husserl instead as
his major intellectual influence. But Derrida still had to reckon
with Sartre, the dominant intellectual figure of postwar France,
and he measured himself against Sartre at the start of his ca-
reer. Derrida followed Sartre’s idea that we wish to, but cannot,
achieve a seamless, confident identity; but in contrast to
Sartre, he denied value to this striving for authenticity.
Sartre, born in 1905 , was the very model of the engagé in-
tellectual, devoted to political causes from Algeria to Vietnam.
From Algeria to the École Normale 25