290 Derrida 1963–1983
in which he was paralysed and suff ocating. He sometimes expressed
the desire to ‘start out on another, a new journey’.^6 A few months
later, he insisted: ‘Life is, for me, too, increasingly burdensome, dif-
fi cult, barely possible. Don’t even feel up to talking about it.’^7 But
that whereof he could not speak, he tried to write. For the fi rst time
since a stay in New York, in 1956, he started to keep a diary, one of
the forms that was most important for him:
If there’s one dream that’s never left me, whatever I’ve written,
it’s the dream of writing something that has the form of a diary.
Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive
chronicle. What’s going through my head? How can I write fast
enough to preserve everything that’s going through my head?
I’ve sometimes started keeping notebooks, diaries again, but
each time I abandoned them [.. .]. But it’s the biggest regret
of my life, since the thing I’d like to have written is just that: a
‘total’ diary.^8At the beginning of the Christmas vacation of 1976, Derrida
started keeping two notebooks. The one, small in format, contained
precise notes about circumcision: this was ‘the book of Élie’, which
he had started to think about shortly after his father’s death, at the
end of 1970. The other, a bit bigger, was a Canson album whose
cover would be reproduced, in 1991, in the book he wrote with
Geoff rey Bennington.^9 Prior to any concrete plan, it was fi rst and
foremost a matter of writing for the pleasure of wielding the pen,
‘to take up a pen, after the typewriter’, on drawing paper that was
‘thick, a bit rough’. But during this time of inner crisis, the notes
rapidly took a very personal turn, gradually sketching out the
fragments of a fascinating self-analysis.
For example, Derrida tried to draw up a list of all the blows he
had received during his youth, soon realizing that they were ‘always
linked to racism, one way or another’: ‘No trauma, for me, perhaps,
which is not linked on some level with the experience of racism and/
or anti-Semitism.’ Several passages dwelt on circumcision, which
defi nitely struck him as ‘a good thread to trace one’s way, in a new
direction, through autobiography’.
On 23 and 24 December, he wrote a great deal. Gradually, a real
project, of considerable scope, started to emerge:
If I don’t invent a new language, a new ‘style’, a new phrase,
this book will have failed. This doesn’t mean that I have to
start there. Quite the opposite. Starting in the old language
and drawing oneself (and the reader) towards an idiom that
would eventually be untranslatable into the language of the
beginnings.^10