512 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
in 1995, Lionel Jospin had already been the candidate of the Left,
and Derrida had even been on his supporting committee. But it
had been a short campaign, and Sylviane Agacinski had remained
in the background. Since 1997, Jospin had been Prime Minister,
which had naturally focused attention on his wife. In autumn 2001,
Derrida was particularly pained to see the story of his relationship
with Sylviane exposed in two biographies of Jospin, long extracts
from which were published in the press: one by Serge Raff y, the
other by Claude Askolovitch.
Derrida could not stand his image starting to resemble the most
conventional soap opera. In Raff y’s book, he was presented as a
‘star of French academia of the 1970s’, ‘the great rival of Jacques
Lacan’:
Derrida, at that time, was a more Mediterranean version of
Richard Gere, but with more diplomas. He was handsome and
brilliant, but he was also married. Sylviane, however, embarked
on a great love story that she knew could lead nowhere. She
accepted this. She was a free woman, a modern woman. She
gave birth in 1980 [sic] to Daniel, her son. As in the song by
Jean-Jacques Goldmann, ‘she had a baby all by herself’. Here
too, she accepted the situation. Love is no respecter of common
rules.^51The tale told by Claude Askolovitch was hardly less colourful.
Agacinski was described as ‘a philosophy agrégée who has been
shaped by life as much as by her book studies’, and Lionel Jospin
as the ‘Tarzan who repaired the injustice that life was to infl ict on
this woman who did not deserve it’. The author described the years
of Sylviane’s youth, when ‘she orbited round the review Tel Quel,
launched and directed by Philippe Sollers’:
Eventually, she started a relationship with Jacques Derrida. A
great philosopher. A great thinker. A great man of the Left.
But great men have their reasons too. Sylviane became preg-
nant. Derrida could not accept this. He did not want a secret
family. It was her freedom. She wanted a child. It was her
choice. To reject this pregnancy would mean saying no to life,
being trapped in a world where she would be entirely dependent
on the choices of others. Sylviane had a baby alone. Now she
was a single mother, with a son, Daniel, whom she undertook
to bring up alone.^52Derrida swung between fury and bitterness. He failed to under-
stand why Sylviane had revealed in public that he was Daniel’s
father. In fact, she had not even needed to make this revelation.