24 Jackie 1930–1962
closer models: René, his older brother, was also an excellent,
passionate player; as goalie for Red Star, he played competitive
football several times.
Jackie liked to imitate the defence of the goalie in this club’s
fi rst team, kicking his heels up. [.. .] In football, like every-
where else, he liked to hear the opinion of competent people.
After one game that our team had lost, he walked all the way
from the stadium in Saint-Eugène, a suburb of Algiers, to hear
what a well-known player had to say. It was a pretty long way
to walk! But the next day, he was really rather proud at being
able to explain it all to us.^16On more than one oc casion, Derrida described his adolescence as
that of a little ‘rogue’ [voyou], a word he liked and that he would use
as the title of one of his last works. According to Fernand Acharrok,
the term would be really rather exaggerated to describe the things
they got up to at the time. ‘We were no angels in our little gang. We
sometimes did some dumb things, but we weren’t rogues, no... .’
To his wife Marguerite, however, Derrida later recounted various
car trips made after drinking heavily, and plans to blow up the
prefabricated buildings in the lycée with some explosives they had
picked up. It is diffi cult to form any precise idea of their misdeeds,
but these seem in the main to have remained mere fantasies. Jackie
and his friends were probably among those ‘Clarks’ mentioned by
Camus – ‘agreeable adolescents who take the greatest pains to look
like gangsters’ and try and seduce the ‘Marlènes’.^17
One thing is certain: within the Derrida family, relations that year
were very strained, especially between Jackie and René, his older
brother by fi ve years. Jackie felt that his brother was valued more
highly than he was, when it came to both sporting and academic
achievements. He could not stand René’s wish to exert authority
over him since their opinions on most subjects were at odds, espe-
cially when it came to politics: René tended to espouse right-wing
positions, whereas Jackie took every opportunity to declare that he
was on the left.
From this time onward, Derrida’s main weapon was silence. He
was capable of not uttering a word throughout an entire meal. In
one of his last texts, he admitted that he had an unusual capacity
for refusing to reply. ‘I’ve been able, ever since childhood, as my
parents knew only too well, to keep up an obstinate silence, one that
no torture could overcome, in the face of anyone who does not seem
worth replying to. Silence is my most sublime, my most peaceable,
but my most undeniable declaration of war or contempt.’^18
Unlike what one might expect from a reading of ‘Circumfession’,
Derrida’s relations with his mother were very tense all through