Derrida: A Biography

296 Derrida 1963–1983

And if I say – as is true – that at this moment I am losing life,

this oddly comes down to the same thing, as if ‘my’ life were

that other which I was forcing to its loss.^25

[.. .] and today when the event which marks the interruption in

February (re)occurs, is confi rmed after the event [après coup] as

if it had not taken place but needed time to coincide with itself

anew, no one will never know the secret from which I write and

the fact that I say it changes nothing.^26

During Derrida’s stay in Yale, his house in Ris-Orangis had had
some work done on it, transforming the attic into an offi ce which he
reached by a ladder and in which he could not stand upright. While
he now had a place of his own, he felt this move to be a sort of exile
in which he was cut off from his nearest and dearest:

I will call this attic (and the person who gave it to me, made me

climb up into it, live, work, separate myself, circumvent myself,

and circumdecide myself) my SUBLIME.

Subliminal, under the heaven, the workshop and departure

lounge for my sublimation, my separation accepted, my renun-

ciation loved, the serenity of disaster. Already feel like dying

here. Then, the trapdoor is closed. I am respectfully enclosed,

not having known or been able to touch me, love me for what I

am, I would have been.^27

This uncomfortable attic in which Derrida would work for many
years would disconcert his American visitors when they came to
visit him in Ris-Orangis. In winter, the little electric radiator did
not make much diff erence to the cold and Derrida had to write with
his neck wrapped in a scarf, swathed in pullovers, and sometimes
an overcoat. Harold Bloom, one of the major fi gures in the Yale
School, ‘expressed his dismay and surprise that this was where the
great works signed “Jacques Derrida” got the green light, upstairs in
an unheated attic’.^28

But, for now, discomfort was not Derrida’s most pressing problem.
In many ways, his new situation was like the promise of a vita nova.
What he was seeking was the form of a writing that would enable
him to ‘fi nd himself again, after having been (by whom?) for so long
lost’. Autobiography made its entry into his work more directly
than before. During the autumn of 1977, Derrida would embark on
several texts that used the form of the ‘log-book’ and took over from
the private journals in which he now stopped writing.
It was probably not entirely a coincidence if the longest part of
Sylviane Agacinski’s fi rst book, Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths