Introduction 3
as well as the two fi lms about him, add up to an autobiography that
is fragmentary but rich in concrete and sometimes quite intimate
details: what he on occasion referred to as an ‘autobiothanatohetero-
graphical opus’. I have drawn a great deal on these invaluable notes
and sketches, comparing them with other sources whenever possible.
In this book, I will not be seeking to provide an introduction to the
philosophy of Jacques Derrida, let alone a new interpretation of a
work whose breadth and richness will continue to defy commenta-
tors for years to come. But I would like to present the biography of
a philosophy at least as much as the story of an individual. So I will
mainly focus on readings and infl uences, the genesis of the principal
works, their turbulent reception, the struggles in which Derrida was
engaged, and the institutions he founded. However, this will not
be an intellectual biography. I fi nd this label irritating for several
reasons; mainly the exclusions it seems to involve: childhood,
family, love, material life. For Derrida himself – as he explained in
his interviews with Maurizio Ferraris – ‘the expression “intellectual
biography” ’ was in any case deeply problematic. Even more so, a
century after the birth of psychoanalysis, was the phrase ‘conscious
intellectual life’. And the boundary between public life and private
life seemed just as fragile and wavering to him:
At a certain moment in the life and career of a public man, of
what is called – following pretty hazy criteria – a public man,
any private archive, supposing that this isn’t a contradic-
tion in terms, is destined to become a public archive if it isn’t
immediately burned (and even then, on condition that, once
burned, it does not leave behind it the speaking and burning
ash of various symptoms archivable by interpretation or public
rumour).^5So this biography has refused to exclude anything. Writing the
life of Jacques Derrida means writing the story of a Jewish boy from
Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who became the
French philosopher whose works have been the most widely trans-
lated throughout the world; the story of a fragile and tormented
man who, to the end of his life, continued to see himself as ‘rejected’
by the French university system. It means bringing back to life
such diff erent worlds as pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm
of the École Normale Supérieure, the structuralist period, and the
turbulent events of 1968 and afterwards. It means describing an
1967 pre-publication letter. [Sollers’ point is that the French title would more usually
be L’Écriture et la diff érence. Derrida’s – inconsistent – practice cannot always be
followed in the English translations, nor of course, a fortiori, in German. – Tr.]