Derrida’s intellectual interests marked a departure from
family tradition. For generations, the Derridas had been small
businessmen; Jackie’s parents read few books. For almost forty
years Jackie’s father Aimé, like his father before him, was a
salesman for the Tachets, a French Catholic family who dealt
in wines and spirits. Aimé, suffering under his “cruel and pa-
ternal chief,” M. Tachet, seemed to spend his whole life travel-
ing, though he always returned home to El Biar to stay the
night with his wife and children (Counterpath 32 ).
Derrida remembered his industrious father going over
his account books while sitting at the dining room table before
dawn, about to depart for a long day of journeying to Algerian
towns, perhaps Kabylie or nearby Vialar. With cash spread out
on the table, young Jackie would help his father balance the
books. When the books didn’t come out right, “it was a catas-
trophe, all was not well with the world” ( 31 – 32 ). After he had
learned to drive at eighteen, Jackie would sometimes accom-
pany Aimé on his trips ( 32 ).
Derrida’s father “would leave the house by car at five
o’clock in the morning and return late in the evening....He
would come back exhausted, stooped over, a heavy briefcase in
his hand, full of money and orders for goods....My first po-
litical experiences linked the unjust suffering of two unfortu-
nates: the ‘Arab,’ and my father, the ‘traveler’” ( 32 ).
Years later, Derrida summed up his sense that, as a child
in Algeria, he was an outsider to French literature and culture.
The Frenchman of Paris was the arbiter of proper style. “He
was the model of distinction, what one should say and how
one should say it” (Points 204 ). Yet, at the same time, Derrida
noted, the pieds-noirs thought of Frenchmen from the conti-
nent as naïve and credulous ( 205 ).
Jackie’s parents had no idea what the École Normale
From Algeria to the École Normale 21