292 Derrida 1963–1983
alliance’* and disgust with ‘community’. This very word makes
me sick.)†These – largely unpublished – notebooks cannot be read without
a sense of unease. Even more than the most personal letters, these
pages are located on a fragile frontier between the private and the
public. As Derrida writes: ‘Anyone reading these notes without
knowing me, without having read and understood everything of what
I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them, while
he would fi nally feel that he was understanding easily.’^14 While their
contents were often very intimate, these notebooks nonetheless form
part of the collection of manuscripts that Derrida decided to deposit
at the University of California, Irvine. And in ‘Circumfession’,
one of his fi nest texts, he referred to them frequently and quoted
long excerpts from them, in a somewhat reworked form. As for the
‘Envois’ in The Post Card, which he started on a few months after
these notes, they are an almost direct extension of them. Once one
has taken cognizance of these notebooks, it is impossible not to take
them into account.
Over and above any literary or philosophical question, it is clear
that Derrida was at this time going through a very deep crisis. The
‘atmosphere of disaster’ in which he felt he was moving made him,
on some days, unable to write. The way he was being torn apart by
his love aff air, and the reproaches with which he was confronted
on both sides, rekindled his melancholy tendencies and made his
anxieties about death more tangible than ever. As he noted on 31
December: ‘The split in the ego, at least in my case, is not a piece of
transcendental patter.’
I am (like) one who, returning from a very long journey (outside
everything, the earth, the world, men and their languages), tries- Or from the covenant. – Tr.
† This almost antagonistic relationship with the question of community is one of
the things that so distinguishes Derrida’s thinking from that of Jean-Luc Nancy. In
1983, the latter published, in the review Aléa, a long article with the title ‘La com-
munauté désoeuvrée’ (‘The idle community’), which later became a book. Maurice
Blanchot developed these ideas in La communauté inavouable (The Shameful
Community) published by Éditions de Minuit in 1984. Both Nancy and Blanchot
attempted to rethink the idea of community at a time when the Communist utopia
was collapsing. As we have just seen, several years before this debate became a major
issue for his colleagues, Derrida rejected the idea and the ‘very word’ of community.
It probably remained in his view associated with forms of belonging to which one is
subjected rather than which one chooses, whether ethnic or religious. It should not
be forgotten that many Jews talk about ‘the Community’ without further specifi ca-
tion: a reality from which Derrida had wished to escape in 1942 (the school called
‘the Alliance’ in the rue Émile-Maupas), as well as when he got married. As we shall
see in the third part of this book, much of Derrida’s later work concerns a projected
‘new International’, freed from any communitarian model.