250 Notes to Pages 16 – 28
helpful: see David Bromwich,Politics by Other Means(New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992 ); Morris Dickstein,Double Agent(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996 ); Denis Donoghue,The Practice of Reading(New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998 ); Mark Edmundson,Literature
Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida(New York: Cambridge University Press,
1995 ); and Geoffrey Harpham,Getting It Right(Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1992 ).
Chapter 1
From Algeria to the École Normale
- See Albert Memmi,Juifs et arabes(Paris: Gallimard, 1974 ), 51.
- For an influential and persuasive treatment of the Algerian
conflict, see Alistair Horne,A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 – 1962 (New
York: Viking/Random House, 1978 ). - See Benjamin Stora,Algeria, 1830 – 2000 : A Short History(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2004 ), 39. - See Jim House and Neil MacMaster,Paris 1961 : Algerians, State Ter-
ror, and Memory(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 ). - “Amoureuse beauté de la terre, l’effloraison de ta surface est mer-
veilleuse. O paysage où mon désir s’est enfoncé! Pays ouvert où ma recherche
se promène; allée de papyrus qui se referme sur de l’eau; roseaux courbés sur
la riviere... J’ai vu se dérouler des printemps” (André Gide,Les nourritures
terrestres,book 1 , section 3 [Paris: Bordas, 1971 ], 87 ). - Jacques Derrida with Jean Birnbaum,Learning to Live Finally: The
Last Interview(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 ), 43 – 44. - Much to his credit, the young Derrida refused to emulate Sartre’s
politics. He also, in later years, resisted the Sartre-like engagement of Noam
Chomsky and Edward Said, two idols of American leftist academics. Said
and Chomsky sometimes applauded tyrannies just as long as they were anti-
American, anti-imperialist, or anti-Israeli. Said, a longtime member of the
political branch of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, heartily
approved of the repressive “Marxist” state of South Yemen, which was at least
a step above Chomsky’s well-known support for Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Both
were enthusiastic about Hezbollah. - Quoted in Harold Bloom, ed.,Jean-Paul Sartre: Modern Critical
Views(Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001 ), 2. Murdoch’s book on Sartre, first
published in 1953 and entitled Sartre: Romantic Rationalist(New York: Viking/
Random House, 1987 ), remains one of the best treatments of his thought.