6 Introduction
More than once, I have felt giddy at the extent and diffi culty of the
task on which I had embarked. It probably needed a certain naïvety,
or at least ingenuousness, to get such a project off the ground.
After all, Geoff rey Bennington, one of the best commentators on
Derrida’s work, had sternly dismissed the possibility of a biography
worthy of the name:
It is of course to be expected that Derrida will some day be the
subject of biographical writing, and there is nothing to prevent
this being of the most traditional kind [.. .]. But this type of
complacent and recuperative writing would at some point have
to encounter the fact that Derrida’s work should at least have
disturbed its presuppositions. I would hazard a guess that one
of the last genres of academic or quasi-academic writing to be
aff ected by deconstruction is the genre of biography. [.. .] Is it
possible to conceive of a multiple, layered but not hierarchised,
fractal biography which would escape the totalising and tele-
ological commitments which inhabit the genre from the start?^8Without denying the interest of such an approach, I have sought, in
the fi nal analysis, to write not so much a Derridean biography as a
biography of Derrida. Mimicry, in this respect as in many others,
does not seem the best way of serving him today.
The faithfulness that counted for me was of another kind.
Derrida had accompanied me, beneath the surface, ever since I fi rst
read Of Grammatology, in 1974. I got to know him a little, ten years
later, when he wrote a generous piece on Right of Inspection, a photo
album that I produced with Marie-Françoise Plissart. We exchanged
letters and books. I never stopped reading him. And now, for three
years, he has occupied the best part of my time and has even slipped
into my dreams, in a sort of collaboration in absentia.*
Writing a biography means living through an intimate and some-
times intimidating adventure. Whatever happens, Jacques Derrida
will now be part of my own life, like a sort of posthumous friend. A
strange, one-way friendship that he would not have failed to ques-
tion. I am convinced of one thing: there are biographies only of the
dead. So every biography is lacking its supreme reader: the one who
is no longer there. If there is an ethics of biographers, it can perhaps
be located here: would they dare to stand, book in hand, in front of
their subject?
- Readers curious to know more about how this book was written, and the prob-
lems the author encountered, can refer to Trois ans avec Derrida: les carnets d’un
biographe (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).