Introduction
Does a philosopher have a life? Can you write a philosopher’s
biography? This was the question raised, in October 1996, at a
conference organized by New York University. In an improvised
statement, Jacques Derrida began by saying:
As you know, traditional philosophy excludes biography, it
considers biography as something external to philosophy.
You’ll remember Heidegger’s reference to Aristotle: ‘What was
Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He
was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.^1However, this was not Derrida’s position. Already, in a 1976 paper
on Nietzsche, he had written:
We no longer consider the biography of a ‘philosopher’ as a
corpus of empirical accidents that leaves both a name and a
signature outside a system which would itself be off ered up to
an immanent philosophical reading – the only kind of reading
held to be philosophically legitimate [.. .].^2Whereupon Derrida called for the invention of ‘a new problematic
of the biographical in general and of the biography of philosophers
in particular’, a rethinking of the borderline between ‘corpus and
body [corps]’. This preoccupation never left him. In a late interview,
he again insisted that ‘the question of “biography” ’ did not cause him
any worries – indeed, one might say that it was of great interest to him:
I am among those few people who have constantly drawn
attention to this: you must (and you must do it well) put philos-
ophers’ biographies back in the picture, and the commitments,
particularly political commitments, that they sign in their own
names, whether in relation to Heidegger or equally to Hegel,
Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, or Blanchot, and so on.^3