Another Life 1976–1977 291
The question he had to face was that of an ‘après-Glas’, something
that went further than Glas, and which he could attain only ‘labori-
ously, gradually, while ceasing to publish [.. .] for a long time’.^11
What Derrida wanted, in short, was to fi nd a very diff erent tone
from those he had deployed until then, to reach a sort of ‘language
without code’. This was ‘the old dream, the only one that interested
[him]’, the dream he had already mentioned in conversations with
Gabriel Bounoure and Henry Bauchau:
To write from this place, with this tone, one that will fi nally
make me appear from the other side, even if unrecognizable.
For I have been misunderstood – radically, and not in the usual
simplistic sense. A writing that nothing in what people know,
have known, have read by me would have enabled them, or me,
to anticipate. To keep of this book only what will have been –
by me today – unrecognizable, unforeseeable.He hoped, now, to be in a position to write this work planned
since 1970, shortly after the death of his father, and never tackled
since. Circumcision would play an important role in it, but that did
not mean that the book would turn into an essay. Derrida wanted
to relate many other things in it, including his depression in Le
Mans. He would go back over his dead brothers and ‘all the family
silences’. What he wanted to change the most profoundly was his
way of approaching writing. For this book to be really other, he
would need to emerge from philosophical discourse, ‘tell a lot of
stories’, ‘launch out unrestrainedly into anecdotes’:
Independently of the content, whether it be more or less inter-
esting, this relation to the anecdote is itself what needs to be
transformed. It is, in me, choked, screwed up, repressed. All
the ‘good reasons’ for this repression must be subjected to sus-
picion. What is being hidden, forbidden? Fear of the doctor:
what will he discover? And I mean the traditional doctor, not
even the psychoanalyst.^12The notebooks also contain a few dream narratives, together with
a rudimentary analysis:
Dream. Taking part in a national political meeting. I start to
speak. Accuse everyone. (As usual: I never form alliances and
shoot in every direction: completely alone. Fear is an alliance,
and that sense of security that maintains the alliance. I’m really
afraid of this, which means there is nothing heroic about my
solitude – instead, something fearful and cowardly: ‘they can’t
catch me here’ – and I start to seek the cause in ‘fl ight from