2 Introduction
Within his own works, Derrida himself was not averse, when
discussing Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and several others, to
bringing in biographical material. In Glas, for example, he fre-
quently quotes Hegel’s correspondence, referring to his family and
his fi nancial worries, without considering these texts to be minor or
extraneous to his philosophical work.
In one of the last sequences of the fi lm on Derrida made by Kirby
Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida went even further, replying
provocatively to the question of what he would like to discover from
a documentary about Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger:
I’d like to hear them talk about their sexual lives. What was the
sexual life of Hegel or Heidegger? [.. .] Because it’s something
they don’t talk about. I’d like to hear them discuss something
they don’t talk about. Why do philosophers present themselves
in their works as asexual beings? Why have they eff aced their
private lives from their work? Why do they never talk about
personal things? I’m not saying someone should make a porn
fi lm about Hegel or Heidegger. I want to hear them talking
about the part love plays in their lives.Even more signifi cantly, autobiography – that of others, Rousseau
and Nietzsche mainly, but his own too – was for Derrida a fully
fl edged philosophical object: both the principles underlying it and
the details contained in it were worthy of consideration. In his view,
autobiographical writing was even the genre, the one which had fi rst
given him a hankering to write, and never ceased to haunt him. Ever
since his teens, he had been dreaming of a sort of immense journal of
his life and thought, of an uninterrupted, polymorphous text – one
that would be, so to speak, absolute:
Memoirs, in a form that does not correspond to what are gen-
erally called memoirs, are the general form of everything that
interests me – the wild desire to preserve everything, to gather
everything together in its idiom. And philosophy, or academic
philosophy at any rate, for me has always been at the service of
this autobiographical design of memory.^4Derrida gave us these Memoirs that are not Memoirs by dissemi-
nating them across many of his works. ‘Circumfession’, The Post
Card, Monolingualism of the Other, Veils, Memoirs of the Blind,
Counterpath,* and many other texts, including many late interviews,
- In most cases, especially for his fi rst works, Derrida preferred to go against
common use and avoid capital letters in the French titles of his books. ‘I agree –
L’écriture et la di ff érence [Writing and diff erence]’, Philippe Sollers wrote to him in a