404 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
ideas that I thought I’d discovered all by myself. I submitted
my ‘Derridabase’ to him at the beginning of 1989. After what
seemed to me a very long time, he phoned me and told me
how much he had enjoyed it. But he was still very enigmatic
about what he was writing. I only knew that he had imposed a
ma terial constraint on himself: fi fty-nine paragraphs – he was
in his fi fty-ninth year – that would be as long as MacWrite, the
computer program he used, would allow. I still knew nothing
of the actual subject.^3Between Bennington and Derrida there was a kind of duel
between two modes of writing. ‘Circumfession’ is fi rst and fore-
most a response to the attempt by ‘Geoff ’ to establish a database.^4
Worried about seeing himself boxed in like this, Derrida tries to
write a text that escapes the systematic cartography drawn up by
Bennington. Next to a corpus of which the critic ‘has not retained
intact a single fragment’,^5 he reintroduces the body, including his
own penis. Just as Bennington’s methodical exposition is turning
him into an almost acceptable philosopher, Derrida spends his time
deconstructing from within the work that is dedicated to him.
For his text, Derrida uses the notes on circumcision begun in
his notebooks of 1976–7 (shortly after Glas) and 1980–1 (just after
The Post Card). He had dreamed at the time of writing The Book
of Elijah, ‘a novel in 4 columns, at 4 discursive levels’,^6 even if
the appearance of the book would not necessarily refl ect this so
immediately as in Glas. Something of this project would subsist
in ‘Circumfession’, where four main motifs are interwoven: a
meditation at the bedside of the dying mother, the autobiographical
anamnesis, extracts from the notebooks on circumcision, and quo-
tations from the Confessions of Saint Augustine. The writing was
done in waves throughout the whole of 1989 and the fi rst months of
- For Derrida it was a kind of intimate response to his mother’s
illness, but also a way of coming back to himself after the painful
polemics of the past two years.
Georgette Safar had been born in 1901 and so was already very
old – bedridden and suff ering from Alzheimer’s. During her intermi-
nable agony, Jacques came to Nice as often as he could, sometimes
correcting the proofs of his books at her bedside. The rest of the
time, he phoned her almost every day. From the end of 1988, when
she suff ered an attack that almost killed her, she was ‘in a strange
lethargy, between life and death, really “hospitalized at home”, no
longer able to recognize [him], hardly able to speak, see, or hear’.^7
‘Circumfession’ is a vast funeral wake, one of Derrida’s most
audacious texts and probably the most moving. By writing these
fi fty-nine sentences that it is impossible to quote without truncating
them, he wanted to