10 Jackie 1930–1962
In 1986, in a dialogue with Didier Cahen broadcast on France-
Culture (‘Le bon plaisir de Jacques Derrida’), he restated his
previous objections, while acknowledging that writing would
doubtless enable him to tackle these questions:
I wish that a narration were possible. Right now, it’s not. I
dream, not of managing, one day, to recount this legacy, this
past experience, this history, but at least of giving a narrative
account of it among other possible accounts. But, in order
to get there, I’d have to undertake a particular kind of work,
I’d have to set out on an adventure that up until now I’ve not
managed. To invent, to invent a language, to invent modes of
anamnesis....^2Derrida’s references to his childhood gradually became less reluc-
tant. In Ulysses Gramophone (fi rst French edition published in
1987), he mentioned his secret forename, Élie,* the name that was
given to him on the seventh day of his life; in Memoirs of the Blind,
three years later, he described his ‘wounded jealousy’ of the talent
for drawing that his family recognized in his brother René.
The year 1991 was a turning-point, with the volume Jacques
Derrida coming out in the series ‘Les Contemporains’, published
by Éditions du Seuil: not only was Jacques Derrida’s contribu-
tion, ‘Circumfession’, autobiographical from beginning to end,
but in the ‘Curriculum vitae’ that followed Geoff rey Bennington’s
analysis, the philosopher agreed to submit to what he called ‘the law
of genre’, even if he did so with an enthusiasm that his co-author
described, delicately, as ‘uneven’.^3 But childhood and youth were by
far the most heavily emphasized parts of his life, at least as regards
any personal refl ections.
Thereafter, autobiographical references in Derrida’s written work
became increasingly frequent. As he acknowledged in 1998: ‘Over
the last couple of decades [.. .], in a way that is both fi ctitious and not
fi ctitious, fi rst-person texts have become more common: personal
records, confessions, refl ections on the possibility or impossibility
of confession.’^4 As soon as we start to fi t these fragments together,
they provide us with a remarkably precise narrative, albeit one that
is both repetitive and full of gaps. They constitute a priceless source
- the main source for that period, and the only source that enables
us to describe Derrida’s childhood empathetically, as if from within.
But these fi rst-person narratives, of course, need to be read, fi rst
and foremost, as texts. They should be approached as cautiously as
the Confessions of Saint Augustine or Rousseau. And in any case,
- The French equivalent of English ‘Elijah’ (and also ‘Elias’). – Tr.