Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 437
Perhaps he did not wish to see their mediocrity. He was probably
not unaware of the services they could render him.
For a long time, in Derrida’s public remarks, Algeria and Jewishness
went unmentioned. The more the years passed, the more he assumed
his origins and gave them a place in his thought and writings. But
as with many other things, there was a persistent ambivalence in
his attitudes. For example, most of the time he felt he had largely
‘eff aced and overcome’ the pied-noir accent he had had in his child-
hood and teens. But when he heard recordings of himself, he could
recognize certain aspects in his elocution: ‘I think it isn’t violent, it
isn’t very marked, but it is marked. In the closure of the “e”s, in a
certain delivery, in a certain rapidity of elocution, with the mouth
a bit closed... I don’t feel very at ease with this accent.’^65 It was at
moments of great emotion or anger that the intonations of Algiers
resurfaced, and he found this diffi cult to deal with: ‘My voice, its
authoritarian aspect, on the one hand, and its accent of origin, on
the other, which, combined, are what I can’t stand and fi nd it even
harder to put up with since the eff ort to keep them under control
always, to some extent, fails.’^66
Derrida’s relations with his family were very ambivalent. Once he
was Jackie again, he was confronted with his past, and his own
resistances. If he was sometimes annoyed and almost ashamed, if he
was disappointed that they did not try to read his work and that real
topics of conversation were so rare, he was extraordinarily attached
to them. But when he discovered that his mother ‘had kept almost
none, just a few at most’ of the cards and letters that he had written
to her ‘over nearly thirty years, twice a week’,^67 he was deeply hurt.
This did not stop him returning every year, on the anniversary of
his father’s death, as if to gather the clan together again. And, every
summer, Marguerite and he spent several weeks at Villefranche-
sur-Mer, just next to Nice, spending whole days on the same little
stretch of beach, as he had done in the old days on the beaches of
Algiers. His cousin Micheline Lévy says that he stayed in the midst
of the family group and hated anyone to move away even just a
little. He wanted to keep his family around him, even if he was silent
and absorbed in his reading most of the time.^68
Whether at Les Rassats or on the Côte d’Azur, holidays were
highly ritualized aff airs and Derrida’s main requirement was that
he could work intensely. At Villefranche, they initially stayed in the
Hôtel Versailles, but Jacques, who found it too noisy, very soon
decided he preferred La Flore, which was also on the hills above the
village.^69 It was one of the most beautiful spots in the world, he often
told his brother and sister. As was his habit, he rose at 6 a.m. and
started work after a fi rst cup of coff ee. In the afternoon, he would