The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 513
Enough people were in the know for Le Figaro to mention the
fact for the fi rst time in its columns, when Jospin’s candidacy was
being discussed, without asking Sylviane the least question. She
had neither denied nor commented on the statement. In any case,
Derrida, always mistrustful of the media, could not accept the con-
straints that weighed on the wife of a Prime Minister, a man who
was standing for President.
On 2 February 2002, the announcement that Jospin would indeed
be a candidate arrived in press agencies by a fax sent from his home
address. Le Monde highlighted the fact:
It was Daniel, the son of Sylviane Agacinski – a student in
hypokhâgne at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris –, who pressed
the fax button [.. .] and thereby announced the candidacy of
Lionel Jospin to AFP [Agence France Presse] and the French
people. Just a detail, but a signifi cant and meaningful image.
Lionel Jospin, unlike Jacques Chirac, has a home, a kitchen (he
poses in it, for the 7 March issue of Paris-Match), and a family.
A lovely family, modern, reconstructed.^53Derrida could merely stand by, powerless and bitter, and watch
as the two main candidates duly fought a battle of images with
one another. Since the offi cial start of the presidential campaign,
Sylviane had been appearing a great deal in the media, far more
than in 1995: an interview on TF1 on 20 March, and interviews with
Le Parisien on 29 March, Le Nouvel Observateur on 4 April, Elle
on 8 April, Gala on 11 April, and a photo reportage in Paris-Match
on 18 April. Sylviane was much more discreet than her husband’s
biographers, and never mentioned Derrida’s name. But the latter
was hurt when he read: ‘Daniel was fi ve years old in 1989, and it
was Lionel who raised him [.. .] I am more grateful than I can say
to a man who was as tender and generous with me as he was with a
young boy like that, who he treated like his own son – it moves me
just to talk about it.’^54 ‘It was Lionel who brought Daniel up. He
made him his own son,’^55 says the legend of a photo of Sylviane in a
double-page spread with the young man.*
Some enjoyed the chance t o snigger, but Derrida’s close friends
could see how saddened he was. Avital Ronell remembers:
For a long time, against all reason, Jacques must have told
himself that nobody knew. It was like a reverse paranoia: he so- In July 2004, Daniel Agacinski, barely twenty, passed the entrance exam to the
École Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm: Derrida certainly learned about this.
Three years later, the young man came top in the philosophy agrégation. At the
University of Toulouse-le-Mirail, he chose to write his thesis on the social and
political conditions of the construction of heroic fi gures.