Towards Independence 1960–1962 123
you are even more beautiful now you are so far, the rain
here, the rain attires, as if it were a magic spell,
the grey of the sky with all the gold of your sun...^21Over and above the wounds on the family and personal level, the
Algerian War also constituted one of the stimuli for all Derrida’s
political thinking. In France, for years, he would avoid speaking in
public about a subject that remained too controversial. But in an
interview he gave in Japan in 1987, he acknowledged that, while he
had approved of the Algerians’ struggle for independence, he had
long hoped for ‘a solution that would allow the French Algerians to
continue to live in that country’, ‘an original political solution that
was not the one that actually came about’.^22
He remained faithful to this conviction, one that was fundamen-
tal but not at all widely shared. On 22 June 2004, in the last televised
broadcast in which he ever took part, he declared that he favoured,
for Israel and Palestine, a diff erent problematic than that of two
sovereign states, before adding: ‘Even between Algeria and France,
although I approved of the independence movement, I would have
preferred there to be a diff erent type of settlement, one from which,
in fact, the Algerians would have suff ered less, and which would
have spurned the rigidly unconditional terms of sovereignty.’^23
Derrida’s late discussions of forgiveness and reconciliation, of
the impossible and hospitality, are in my view, in several respects,
echoes of this Algerian wound. During the 1990s, thanks to the
‘admirable’ fi gure of Nelson Mandela, the situation of South Africa
was, as it were, a confi rmation that the model he had imagined
for Algeria was not necessarily illusory. When he gave his opinion
about apartheid and what had followed, or the Israel–Palestine con-
fl ict, he would never stop thinking about Algeria, of the Algerian
within him, without which all the rest would be incomprehensible.
‘My adolescence lasted until I was thirty-two,’ Derrida stated in
one of his last interviews.^24 The completion of his fi rst book, the
defi nitive adoption of a new fi rst name, and the independence of
Algeria were events of the year 1962 that marked the end of an era.*
The consequences of this break would make themselves a pparent
over the following months.
- Jean-Luc Nancy also considers this same year, 1962, as a major turning-point. In
his text ‘The independence of Algeria, the independence of Derrida’, he compares
the appearance of the concept of diff érance with the independence of Algeria, where
the issue was less a ‘re-founding in an origin than the invention of an “origin” yet to
come’ (Derrida à Alger: Un regard sur le monde, Arles: Actes Sud; Algiers: Barzakh,
2008, pp. 19–25).