474 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
without knowing it, Daniel and Jacques had just been travelling in
the same plane. As if at a loss, Derrida turned away.
With the years, this story had assumed an increasingly painful
signifi cance. Derrida spoke so often in praise of secrets, but this
was one he found hard to bear. It was one of the reasons why
his relations with Sarah Kofman had cooled: she was an inveter-
ate chatterbox, and had mentioned the previous liaison between
Jacques and Sylviane in front of outsiders, and mentioned Daniel.
This was, for Derrida, intolerable. He was probably most afraid that
the story would reach the ears of his family in Nice. His two other
sons had been in the know for a long time, but they had refrained
from telling him so. One day, however, Pierre tried to broach the
topic:
As I had the impression that my father must feel guilty towards
my brother and me, I took the initiative and arranged a face-
to-face meeting with him. After talking about this and that,
I told him that I knew about Daniel’s existence, and that he
wasn’t to worry about it as far as I was concerned. He seemed
very surprised that I knew, but he very quickly clammed up
and told me he preferred not to talk about it. I know only that
he didn’t want to make any moves to see Daniel, but that if the
child came to him, he’d be prepared to meet him. He thought
this was highly unlikely: over the years, his view of Sylviane had
become increasingly negative, and he worried about what she
might have been saying about him... I realized there was no
point returning to this subject. In my father’s temperament, so
open and audacious about most things, there were a few very
archaic elements that brooked no discussion. This was particu-
larly true of anything to do with the family, in the narrow sense
and more broadly speaking.^41This period was painfully marked by three deaths, including two
suicides.
Sarah Kofman killed herself on 15 October 1994, the anniversary
of Nietzsche’s birth: he had been one of the thinkers who had most
infl uenced her. A few months earlier, she had published a short
autobiographical narrative, Rue Ordener, rue Labat, in which for
the fi rst time she described her childhood under the Occupation, the
deportation of her father, and her strained relations with her mother
and the woman who had saved her life. In spite of various impor-
tant publications, Kofman’s academic career had been strewn with
diffi culties, and only in 1991 was she fi nally made a professor at the
Sorbonne.
For Derrida, as for many others, Sarah had always been a