118 Jackie 1930–1962
dream has become an anachronism, he continues to think that it was
by no means the façade of an ‘Algeria-as-our-Papa-wished-it’.*
A few weeks later, Nora thanked him for these ‘pages so dense
and so profound that it would need a second book’ to reply to
them. He felt that he had acted as a catalyst for Derrida’s personal
thoughts, and that he was lucky enough to harvest their ripe fruit.
Nora wanted to meet so that they could discuss the matter at greater
length. He acknowledged that he had written the book in a rough-
and-ready way. ‘I thought I would relate my stay, refl ect on the
things I had seen – but if I had attacked the subject in its full scope,
head-on, I would have written a whole thesis, and this would have
paralysed me.’^9
The two men spent a long evening together at the end of June,
discussing things freely and without attempting to reach any conclu-
sions. Derrida said he was pleased at this exchange of ideas. Even
though the discussion sometimes seemed to go round in circles, their
disagreement was, in his view, just ‘another way of agreeing with
one another or disagreeing with ourselves. And how can anyone
think seriously about Algeria – or anything else – without ending
up in that position?’ He thought he could sense that Nora would
like to speak his mind on certain points, for example by replying
to an account published by Derrida. But ‘there is no question – for
reasons too many to mention – of writing an article’. The need to
protect his family was probably one of these reasons. However, he
had no objection to all or part of his long letter being published
anonymously, as coming from ‘a friend from Algiers’.^10 This plan
seems not to have led to anything concrete.
A few weeks later, from El Biar, Derrida sent a new letter to his
former schoolmate:
I’m having a strange holiday here: between a bit of work [.. .]
and the pleasures of the sea, the day is taken up, in the midst of
this strange society, brooding over unthinkable problems. And
I realize that I love this country more and more, love it madly,
which does not contradict the aversion I have long stated for it.^11- In an excellent article, ‘Liberalism and the Algerian War: the case of Jacques
Derrida’ (Critical Inquiry no. 36, winter 2010), Edward Baring provides a detailed
analysis of Derrida’s attitude towards the Algerian War, comparing this letter to
Nora with a piece of history homework that Derrida wrote in khâgne in 1952, on the
‘Causes, characters and fi rst consequences of French colonization from 1888 to 1914’.
If we go along with Baring’s view, the attitude and conceptions of the future author of
Monolingualism of the Other remained, for a long time, those of a colonist. Later in his
text, he refers – as if to deplore it – to the fact that Derrida did not sign the ‘Manifesto
of the 121’ in 1960. In my view, this is to ignore the fact that Derrida was at the time
completely unknown – nobody would have dreamed of asking him to sign, and if he
had done so, he would have placed his family, still living in Algeria, in grave danger.