244 Derrida 1963–1983
was soon to be formed. A personal factor probably played a part in
this process.
The borders between public and private life are one of the most
delicate questions which a biographer encounters. And the long
love aff air between Derrida and Sylviane Agacinski that started in
1972 is one of the major diffi culties the present biographer has had
to face. Agacinski was not willing to present her own account, and
the immense correspondence that she exchanged with Derrida will
apparently be inaccessible for a long time.*
While we should respect everyone’s privacy and Derrida’s oft-
repeated liking for secrecy, we should also bear in mind his remarks
on an even more celebrated aff air, that between Hannah Arendt and
Martin Heidegger. Derrida referred to it at a seminar on 11 January
1995, in words which were doubtless carefully weighed:
I think that one day, when it comes to Arendt and Heidegger
[.. .], we will need to talk openly, fi ttingly, philosophically, with
due seriousness and at appropriate length, of the great shared
passion that bound them together over what might be called ‘a
whole life’, across or beyond continents, wars, the Holocaust.
This singular passion whose archive, so to speak, with its count-
less historical threads, inextricably political, philosoph ical,
public and private, manifest or secret, academic and family, is
slowly being revealed [.. .] this lifelong passion deserves better
than what generally enshrouds it – an embarrassed or discreet
silence on the one side, or, on the other, vulgar rumour or
whispering in the corridors of academia.^36- The reader may recall that Derrida, who kept the least little scrap of paper, in
his last public conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
related how, one day, he had destroyed a correspondence ‘with grim determination’:
‘I destroyed a correspondence that I should not have destroyed and I will regret it
all my life long’ (Rue Descartes no. 52, 2006, p. 96). Like other people, no doubt, I
fi rst thought that these destroyed letters were those from Sylviane Agacinski. But
this auto-da-fé is also referred to in The Post Card as having occurred several years
before Jacques and Sylviane met: ‘The most beautiful letters in the world, more
beautiful than all literatures – I began by tearing them up on the banks of the Seine,
but it would have taken twenty-four hours [.. .]. I packed it all back in the car and in
a suburb that I did not know, where I chose to wind up, I burned everything, slowly,
at the side of a road. I told myself that I would never start again’ (The Post Card,
p. 33). I do not know where the letters sent by Agacinski to Derrida are now; but it
is known that he did not destroy them. And, according to acquaintances, nearly a
thousand letters from Derrida have been preserved by Agacinski. In the pages of the
present work, the reader will have had a chance to appreciate how talented a letter-
writer Derrida was; so one may indulge in dreaming of these letters and hoping that
they will be published one day, even if far in the future.