406 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
meeting at the Louvre. That same evening, while driving home,
the theme of the exhibition hits me.^10On 16 July, Derrida had a dream involving blind people attacking
him. He was increasingly convinced: ‘The drawing is blind, if not the
draftsman or draftswoman. As such, and in the moment proper to
it, the operation of drawing would have something to do with blind-
ness.’ This conviction became the subject of the exhibition and the
accompanying catalogue.
The same year, 1989, was marked by another shock, which aff ected
Derrida much more than one might have expected. After the phi-
losophy agrégation, his son Pierre wrote his thesis very quickly,
supervised by Louis Marin. And thanks to Didier Franck, who had
just started a series of philosophical works published by Éditions
de Minuit, it was immediately published under the title Guillaume
d’Ockham, le Singulier (William of Ockham, the Singular). But the
young man decided to have it published under the name of Pierre
Alféri, his maternal grandmother’s surname. In Derrida’s library,
the book has this winning dedication: ‘For you, Papa, to whom I
owe much more than a name. For you, Maman, to whom I owe
much more than a name.’
On Pierre’s part, as he explains, this was not in the least an
impulsive decision.
Ever since my teens, I’d felt that the name Derrida wasn’t
really mine, that it was already taken, so to speak. If I’d pub-
lished under my own name, I’d have felt I was being a hermit
crab. Of course, I wasn’t so naïve as to think that I just needed
to sign Pierre Alféri for people not to know who I was. But all
the same it gave me a little bit of room for manoeuvre. I didn’t
ask Jacques about it and at fi rst he wasn’t very happy with my
decision. In any case, even if it might seem a hostile act, I was
ready to defend it, since I felt I had no other choice. I kept this
signature for all my other works. ‘Pierre Alféri’ isn’t a mere
pseudonym; it’s become a name for everyday use, following the
de rigueur formula.^11For Jacques Derrida, the question of the signature had long been
an essential theme. He couldn’t understand why his eldest son would
want to change his name. In his view, it was almost a form of denial.
And when Emmanuel Levinas told him that he found this decision
‘very noble’, he was disconcerted.^12 In his interviews with Maurizio
Ferraris, Derrida said:’[T]here is always an inadequacy in the very
idea of paternity: [.. .] one can sign neither a child nor a work. Being
a father means having the extremely joyful and painful experience of