Introduction 5
ally familiarized myself with a handwriting that all of Derrida’s
friends knew was diffi cult to decipher, and I was lucky enough to
be the fi rst person to be able to measure the incredible sum of docu-
ments accumulated by Derrida throughout his life: school work,
personal notebooks, manuscript versions of books, unpublished
classes and seminars, the transcriptions of interviews and debates,
press articles, and, of course, his correspondence.
While he scrupulously preserved the least little letter that he was
sent – and was still regretting, a few months before he died, the only
correspondence that he had destroyed* –, Derrida only rarely made
drafts or copies of his own letters. So considerable research has been
necessary to track down and consult the most signifi cant of these
exchanges: for example, those with Louis Althusser, Paul Ricoeur,
Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel
Bounoure, Philippe Sollers, Paul de Man, Roger Laporte, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Sarah Kofman. Even more
valuable are certain letters sent to friends of Derrida’s youth, such
as Michel Monory and Lucien Bianco, during his formative years.
Many others cannot be located or have been lost, such as the great
number of letters sent by Derrida to his parents.
One far from negligible detail is that I embarked on this biogra-
phy in the immediate aftermath of Derrida’s death, just when we
had barely started to enter into ‘the return of Jacques Derrida’, to
quote a phrase of Bernard Stiegler. Begun in 2007, it was published
in 2010, the year when he would have been eighty. So it would have
been absurd to draw only on written material when most of the phi-
losopher’s associates were potentially accessible.
The trust placed in me by Marguerite Derrida has been excep-
tional. She has allowed me access to the full set of archives, but
has also granted me several interviews. Meetings, often long and
sometimes repeated, with witnesses from every period have been
essential. I have been lucky enough to talk to Derrida’s brother,
sister, and favourite cousin, as well as many fellow-students and
companions of his youth, who shed light on what he once described
as a thirty-two-year-long adolescence. I was able to question a
hundred or so of his associates: friends, colleagues, publishers, stu-
dents, and even some of his detractors. But I have not, of course,
managed to make contact with all the potential witnesses, and some
did not wish to meet with me. A biography is also constructed from
obstacles and refusals, or, if you prefer, resistances.
- ‘I once destroyed a correspondence. With grim determination: I crushed it – it
didn’t work; burned it – it didn’t work... I destroyed a correspondence that I
should not have destroyed and I will regret it all my life’ (Rue Descartes no. 52, 2006,
p. 96). There are several indications that this destruction occurred at the end of the
1960s or the beginning of the 1970s.