The Territories of Deconstruction 1984–1986 357
Apparently, Derrida saw Daniel at least once, shortly after his
birth. But he did all he could to keep the birth of his third son secret,
especially from his mother, his brother, and his sister. While he said
nothing to Pierre and Jean, this did not stop them from becoming
rapidly aware of the situation. ‘I learned about Daniel’s birth from
the gang, quite early on,’ remembers Pierre.
Ever since childhood, I’d seen a lot of my father’s associates,
and some of them had become friends of mine. In spite of all
the precautions he tried to take, quite a few people were in the
know. And in any case, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc
Nancy, René Major, and a few others continued to see Sylviane
long after the split. In our family, by contrast, there was total
silence, and still is. The subject just couldn’t be mentioned.^4It was, however, on Marguerite’s advice that Jacques decided
to recognize offi cially this child whom he barely knew on 6 March
- But the confusion waxed all the greater, since Derrida later
told Élisabeth Roudinesco that it is recognition much more than
genetics which defi nes paternity:
Identifying a genitor is not the same as designating a father.
The genitor is not the father! The father is someone who recog-
nizes his child; the mother recognizes her child. And not only in
a legal sense. The obscurity of the question lies entirely in this
‘experience’ that is so hastily called ‘recognition’. Beyond or
on this side of the law, its modalities can be diverse, complex,
convoluted; they can spread, become stabilized or destabilized
in the course of a history whose end is never determinable. It
is this ‘experience’ that will give rise to a very complex inter-
weaving of symbolic possibilities – and that will found a bond
(always more or less stable or fragile, never assured) between
the ‘moment of the genitor’ and the ‘symbolic moment’.^5As for Sylviane Agacinski, questions about sexual diff erence,
especially maternity, became a main topic in her thinking, and
this decisive experience fl owed into that refl ection. She wrote on
the question of relations between masculine and feminine, fi lia-
tion, and confl ict within the couple in Drama of the Sexes: Ibsen,
Strindberg, Bergman^6 and on the interplay of biological and bio-
graphical in Body in Pieces.^7 In a tellingly symptomatic way, one
of the chapters in Parity of the Sexes is called ‘Freedom and fecun-
dity’; Agacinski here distances herself from Simone de Beauvoir’s
feminism, stating that ‘[n]othing proves that a woman can only be
free through the denial of one of her most beautiful and gratifying
possibilities’: