decision, typical of Stalinist intellectuals, was to conceal his
knowledge that the Soviet Union was a police state “pour ne
pas décourager Billancourt” (so as not to discourage Billan-
court, the Paris suburb full of Renault workers).
In the question and answer session at New York’s Film
Forum following the premiere of the film Derridain October
2002 , Derrida was asked about Sartre by a member of the
audience. His response was notably cagey. Derrida said, “I
read him intensely when I was young, and then I departed
from him. I realized he was not a strong philosopher....It’s
still a question for me how this man, who is not a very power-
ful philosopher, not a very good writer, either; who made so
many mistakes in politics—who made mistakes all the time—
nevertheless, is still such an admired figure in France....But
no, I don’t owe him anything in philosophy” (Derrida 110 ). In
another interview, Derrida went much further and called
Sartre’s example “nefarious and catastrophic” (Points 122 ).
The voluble leftist Sartre was a warning sign for Derrida
in the 1950 s. Derrida, by contrast, never praised an authoritar-
ian regime.^7 Instead of the revolutionary violence that Sartre
approved, Derrida spoke of the strictly metaphorical “vio-
lence” done by philosophical concepts.
Derrida rejected Sartre the political prophet. But Sartre’s
philosophy remains a powerful ancestor of Derrida’s. Like
Sartre, Derrida sees the human impulse toward undivided
consciousness, and therefore integral selfhood, as a basic part
of us. In reality, Derrida and Sartre agree, such wholeness is
a fond delusion. Derrida decentered the subject, but Sartre
had already deprived the subject of security, of stable iden-
tity. Iris Murdoch notes that for Sartre “the urge toward ‘self-
coincidence’... is the key to our being.”^8 This drive toward
unified, substantial identity can never succeed; we remain
28 From Algeria to the École Normale