28 Jackie 1930–1962
even further away from the Judaism of his childhood. He loved
Nietzsche as much as Rousseau, however dissimilar they might be:
‘I remember this debate inside myself very clearly, I tried to recon-
cile them, I admired them both equally, I knew that Nietzsche was
a merciless critic of Rousseau, and I kept wondering how one could
be a Nietzschean and a Rousseauist at once.’^26
Jackie did read very widely, but he took very little interest in
classic novels. He had only a superfi cial acquaintance with authors
such as Dumas, Balzac, Stendhal, or Zola. On the other hand, he was
fascinated by Paul Valéry, both as poet and as essayist. And even
though he quoted him less frequently, he also liked Albert Camus:
as in Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth and The Immoralist, he found in
Camus’s Nuptials and The Stranger, which latter had recently come
out, an almost miraculous encounter between French literature, ‘the
experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one
in which we lived’,^27 and his own concrete environment.*
Among the most formative readings of Derrida’s adolescence, we
should not forget Antonin Artaud, even though few of his texts were
accessible.
If I try to remember the fi rst time Artaud’s name made an
impact on me, it was probably through reading Blanchot, who
referred to Artaud’s Correspondence with Jacques Rivière. So I
read those Artaud letters and, in a movement of identifi catory
projection, I found myself in sympathy with that man who said
that he had nothing to say, that nothing was being dictated
to him, as it were, while at the same time he was inhabited by
the passion and the drive to write, and probably also to create
drama. [.. .]
So why did I, as a young man, identify with Artaud in this
way? I began in my adolescence (it lasted until I was thirty-
two.. .) writing passionately, without writing, with this sense
of emptiness: I know that I must write, that I want to write,
that I have to write, but basically I don’t have anything that
doesn’t begin resembling what’s already been said. When I
was fi fteen–sixteen, I remember, I had this sense of being pro-
téiforme [protean] – this is a word I came across in Gide, and
it really took my fancy. I could assume any form, write in any- In those years, Jackie communicated his love of literature to his cousin Micheline
Lévy, who had to leave school at a very early age. He encouraged her to join a
library and advised her about what to read. Thanks to him, she became an ardent
reader, very keen on Gide, Camus, Chateaubriand, and Dostoevsky. Later on, she
would be the only family member to follow Derrida’s publications closely, some-
times attending his conferences or his seminars and ritually having lunch with him
once a year.