Towards Independence 1960–1962 117
Derrida also criticized Nora for having suggested that the average
income of French Algerians was higher than that of French people
in France, whereas the reverse was the case, and only a minority of
colonists enjoyed any real economic privileges. He took advantage
of a long note to sketch out a critique of Marxism:
This means, perhaps, that the notion of ‘colonial system’
cannot be understood essentially and always on the basis of the
sole idea of profi t, short-term or long-term. It is perhaps the
whole of Marxist dogma about colonization, economic impe-
rialism (and the phases of capitalism) that needs to be revised,
especially as it has ultimately left its mark – sometimes anony-
mously – on the most banal and unquestioned defi nition of the
colonial phenomenon.As he always did in the case of those to whom he felt close,
Derrida defended the complex and nuanced positions of Germaine
Tillion and Albert Camus, even if these positions were used by
some people ‘to support interests that neither of them defend’. It is
not so easy to talk of ‘objective complicity’, rejecting an argument
because it has been used by ‘ultras’. Unless one is careful, it is easy
to fall into dogmatic and sectarian positions that all start in this
same way, whether they are revolutionary or not. ‘With Germaine
Tillion, you say, “we were ripe for Gaullism before de Gaulle”.
Maybe. Personally, I often regret that this was not even more true,
for Algeria, and even earlier... .’
In connection with Camus, who had died the previous year,
Derrida set out a more circumstantial analysis than anywhere
else:
Firstly, I found excellent the intention behind the few pages
that you devote to The Stranger. I’ve always read this book as
an Algerian book, and all the critico-philosophical apparatus
that Sartre plonked on top of it seems, in my view, to lessen its
meaning and its ‘historical’ originality, hiding them from view,
maybe even from Camus himself, since he took himself too
quickly to be [.. .] a great thinker. [.. .] Not all that long ago, I
often judged Camus the way you do, for the same reasons [.. .].
I don’t know now whether this is right, and whether some of
his warnings will not appear, tomorrow, as signs of elementary
lucidity and moral challenge. Many things, all of his past to
begin with, make it possible to Camus to be credited with a
pure and clear intention.^8This French-Muslim Algeria, for which Camus had always striven,
is what Derrida too wishes for. And even though he knows that this