4 Introduction
exceptional series of friendships with major writers and philoso-
phers, from Louis Althusser to Maurice Blanchot, and from Jean
Genet to Hélène Cixous, by way of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-
Luc Nancy. It means going over a no less long series of polemics,
waged over serious issues but often brutal in tone, with thinkers
such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John
R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies
that spilled over from academic circles into a wider audience, the
most celebrated of them concerning Heidegger and Paul de Man.
It means retracing a series of courageous political commitments in
support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage.
It means relating the fortune of a concept – deconstruction – and
its extraordinary infl uence that went far beyond the philosoph-
ical world, aff ecting literary studies, architecture, law, theology,
feminism, queer studies, and postcolonial studies.
In order to carry out this project, I have of course embarked on as
complete as possible a reading or rereading of an oeuvre which is, as
everyone knows, very prolifi c: eighty published works and innumer-
able uncollected texts and interviews. I have explored the secondary
literature as much as possible. But I have relied mainly on the con-
siderable archives that Derrida has left us, as well as on meetings
with a hundred or so witnesses.
The archive was, for the author of Paper Machine, a real passion
and a constant theme for refl ection. But it was also a very concrete
reality. As he stated on one of his last public appearances: ‘I’ve
never lost or destroyed anything. Not even the little notes [.. .]
that Bourdieu or Balibar used to stick on my door [.. .] I’ve got
everything. The most important things and the most apparently
insignifi cant things.’^6 Derrida wanted these documents to be openly
accessible. He went so far as to explain:
The great fantasy [.. .] is that all these papers, books or texts,
or fl oppy disks, are already living after me. They are already
witnesses. I’m always thinking about it – about those who will
come after my death and have a look at, for example, such and
such a book I read in 1953 and will ask: ‘Why did he put a tick
by that, or an arrow there?’ I’m obsessed by the structure of
survival [la structure survivante] of each of these bits of paper,
these traces.^7The major part of these personal archives is gathered in two collec-
tions, which I have methodically explored: the Special Collection of
the Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine; and the
Derrida collection at the IMEC – the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition
Contemporaine – at the Abbaye d’Ardenne, near Caen. I’ve gradu-