At the Frontiers of the Institution 1991–1992 441
The reviews were very positive, and also insisted on the contribu-
tion Derrida had made. In Le Nouvel Observateur, Didier Eribon
hailed ‘Circumfession’. ‘With this dazzling narration, in which an
impossible biography struggles with the Bildungsroman for domi-
nance, the philosopher (the writer?) has given us one of his most
magnifi cently successful performances.’^4 Marc Ragon in Libération
and Claude Jannoud in Le Figaro were equally captivated. Roger-
Pol Droit, who reviewed the book belatedly for Le Monde, was
much more perplexed: in his view, ‘Circumfession’ was a ‘very
strange text, almost intolerable with its mixture of shamelessness
and cunning, but also its crude and risky simplicity. [.. .] A useful
volume for all sorts of readers, this book may also arouse a certain
unease, in which it is probably diffi cult to distinguish between
artifi ce and authenticity, irritation and emotion.’^5
The drama of ‘Circumfession’, one of Derrida’s most original
and accessible texts, is directly linked to the context in which it
was conceived. Dialoguing with Geoff rey Bennington’s rigorous
analysis so as better to deconstruct it, Derrida’s text remains quite
inseparable from it. Confi ned to the lower third of the page, on a
rather gloomy grey background, it looks like a huge footnote, at
fi rst glance quite unalluring, whereas it would – more than other
pieces – have merited existence as a work in its own right. We are
far from the typographical prowesses of Glas, far from the big book
on circumcision of which Derrida had dreamed for many years. Of
course, the book was designed to look just like this. All the same:
Derrida’s work here reaches one of its limits, and it alienated many
of ‘Circumfession’’s potential readers. Hélène Cixous, who attaches
particular importance to this text and has often worked on it with
her students, provides them with enlarged photocopies, without
the grey background. In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young
Jewish Saint, she reproduces a few pages of ‘Circumfession’ in a
large format, scattered with coloured letters and words, thereby
doing justice to the beauty of Derrida’s text. This beauty is also
brought out in the audio version recorded by Derrida for Éditions
des Femmes in 1993.^6
At the same time as Seuil’s Jacques Derrida, a small work of a com-
pletely diff erent kind was published by Minuit: The Other Heading.
This was the text of a lecture given in Turin, the previous year, at
a conference on ‘European Cultural Identity’ chaired by Giovanni
Vattimo. In this important political intervention, Derrida mainly
developed the idea that what was ‘proper’ to a culture was that it
was not identical to itself: ‘Not to not have an identity, but not to be
able to identify itself, to be able to say “me” or “we”; to be able to
take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself or, if you
prefer, only in the diff erence with itself [avec soi].’^7 At a time when