Читать книгу An Event, Perhaps - Peter Salmon - Страница 9

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The Kid

The child who comes remains unforeseeable, it speaks, all by itself, as at the origin of another world, or at the other origin of this one…

– Echographies of Television

I have only one language and it is not my own.

– Monolingualism of the Other

His name was not even Jacques Derrida.

I am looking for his grave. The cemetery at Ris-Orangis, the Paris outer suburb where Derrida spent much of his adult life with his wife, the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier, is as nondescript as the suburb itself. Windswept and heterodox, there are sections for Christians, for Muslims, for Jews, but they flow into one another, placed according to chronology and available space. The rows are Jewish, Christian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Jewish, Jewish, Muslim. I am not sure where to look.

Ris-Orangis is an hour’s drive south of Paris, snaking away from the Seine and back to it. There is a preschool here named after Derrida and one, incongruously, after Pablo Picasso. At the cemetery, two men in hi-vis jackets are blowing leaves and watch me striding up and down the rows, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Jewish, Jewish, Muslim. I nod at them and do another lap, searching for Jacques Derrida.

One of the leaf blowers turns off his machine and approaches me, ‘Puis-je vous aider, Monsieur?’ ‘Oui,’ I say, ‘connaissez-vous Jacques Derrida?’ He looks puzzled, repeats theatrically, baffled by my Anglophone pronunciation. ‘Jacques Derrida? Jacques Derrida? Jacques Derrida?’ Then realisation. ‘Ah,’ he says, throwing his arms wide and switching to English. ‘Yes, Jacques Derrida! The poet!’

The grave is not in any specific section. Facing a wooden fence is a simple slab of marble on which his name is chiselled. He is Derrida, yes, but the first name is the one he was born with, and it is written too far away from his surname, as though it was a last-minute decision not to write Jacques, with its fat q and u. On his grave, as on his birth certificate, and as to his friends, he is not Jacques. He is Jackie. Born Algiers 1930. Died Ris-Orangis 2004.

It is not known in which of the cinemas in Algiers Haïm Aaron Prosper (Aimé) Derrida, a wine merchant like his own father, Abraham, and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar, daughter of Moïse Safar and Fortunée Temime, saw Charlie’s Chaplin’s first full-length feature film, The Kid, or even if they saw it together, although the release date of 1921, the six to eighteen months it took films to transfer from Paris to Algiers, and their marriage in 1923 make it tempting to believe that they did. There were between fifteen and twenty cinemas in Algiers at the time, most of them named – in a way that was to haunt Aimé and Georgette’s third son – after their equivalents in Paris, including Le Vox, Le Majestic, Le Splendid, Le Cameo, Le Regent, Le Cinéma Musset, L’Empire, Le Bijou, L’Alhambra and Le Colisée.

Chaplin was a superstar in Algiers, as he was throughout the world. While most films that transferred from Paris to Algiers, such as The Blue Angel, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Threepenny Opera, played for a week – plenty of time for as many of the city’s 400,000 people to see them if they wanted to – Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights played for six weeks in the spring of 1932. For many Algerians – then as now – the Little Tramp represented the common man fighting against the oppressors.

Chaplin himself visited Algiers in April 1931, but was forced to cancel all of the excursions his hosts had planned – to the Tomb of the Christian Woman, and the funerary monument to the Berber King Juba II and Queen Cleopatra Selene II, daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony – as the crowds that followed him everywhere, crying ‘Charlot, long live Charlot!’ were too large. As he wrote in his travelogue A Comedian Sees the World, ‘With all his Omar Khayyam philosophy, the Arab is an enthusiastic film fan, for when we arrived thousands were lined along the road all the way to the hotel.’¹ In private he was less charitable, saying to his travelling companion, the actress May Reeves, ‘What an unbearable race. Every cobbler takes himself for a sheik, although he is less than nothing! Enough of Arabs and these beastly Algerians, let’s go back to France.’²

It is unlikely that Chaplin, mostly trapped in his hotel, passed down the propitiously named rue Saint-Augustin. Had he, the adoring fans may have included Aimé and Georgette, their eldest son René Abraham and their babe in arms, less than one year old in 1931, a boy they named after Jackie Coogan, the star of Chaplin’s The Kid.

Jackie was born at daybreak on 15 July 1930. His mother was ‘playing poker (already, always!) at my birth,’ he wrote. Georgette was a week short of her thirtieth birthday (Aimé five years older), and her passion for poker lasted all her life. And yet it may be that the game was a way of distracting herself; only ten months earlier she had lost her second child, Paul, at three months old. The Derridas had, it would seem, chosen a quick, but risky, way to assuage their mourning.

This older brother haunted Jackie throughout his life. In his ‘Circumfession’ (written between visits to his mother, dying in hospital, he would call the book ‘a kind of vigil, a wake’) he described himself as existing ‘in the place of another’. The death of Paul, it is impossible not to speculate, was responsible for the birth of Jackie.

Jackie’s relationship with his mother was particularly intense. He was a boy who ‘up until puberty cried out “Mummy I’m scared” every night’, until, in an echo of the narrator in Proust, his parents allowed him to sleep each night on a divan beside their bed.³ Georgette, he would later write, was not a very demonstrative or affectionate mother. She did not just keep her poker face for the card table.

The Algeria into which he was born was, in 1930, in the midst of an ambiguous celebration. Ten days before his birth was Le Centenaire de l’Algérie française, the hundredth anniversary of French colonial rule. There had been six months of celebrations, artistic, cultural and sporting.

The French president, Gaston Doumergue, unveiled a metre monument on the beach at Sidi Ferruch, 30 kilometres west of Algiers, the spot where 34,000 French soldiers commenced their invasion in 1830. The monument featured two entwined female figures, one representing France, looking maternal and protective, and the other representing Algeria, seeking guidance and protection. In his speech Doumergue said, ‘The celebration of the centenary will show in a decisive fashion the human, peaceful, just and beneficial character of the French colonization methods and of the work of civilization she is pursuing.’ The new Musée des Beaux Arts was opened in Algiers, as was an exhibition in Oran – each pavilion on its five hectares allowing people to tour all of Greater France in a day. Even Charlie Chaplin had, it was rumoured, been invited, but could not attend as he was shooting City Lights. The commissioner general of the Centenary, Gustave Mercier, saluted ‘another France, barely a hundred years old, already strong, full of life and future, uniting in its happy formula Latin races and indigenous races, in order to make them all French races.’⁴

Eighty thousand tourists visited Algeria in the course of the year, attending its old and new attractions, indulging in the Orientalist thrill. As James McDougall writes in The History of Algeria, settlers ‘saw their security of livelihood, home and person as dependent on the continued subjugation of Algerians, the “native peril” whom they saw through a confused combination of racial and religious stereotypes, exotic fantasies, imagined paternal benevolence and, from time to time, hysterical terror.’⁵ Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher who would chronicle the Algerian independence struggle, would go further, noting it is always the coloniser who is seen to make history: ‘His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is the absolute beginning. A compartmentalized Manichean and immobile world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who conquered the country, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge.’⁶ By contrast, the natives were part of the landscape, and thus dehumanised.

The question of where the Juifs d’Algérie, the community into which Jackie was born, fitted into Algerian society was, inevitably, a complex one. Derrida’s family were Sephardic, and claimed roots from Toledo in Spain. In 1870, Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship by the Crémieux Decree, which brought their rights in line with the rest of the pied-noir (black-foot, i.e. wearing shoes) population of Algeria. The majority Muslim population had no such rights, and were subject to the Code de l’indigénat, which gave them, at best, second-class status before the law. Although tensions had not reached the scale that would lead to and accompany the Algerian War, they were already present. At the same cinemas where Aimé and Georgette had watched Chaplin, Algerians ‘clapped and cheered when the hero made stirring speeches about Swiss independence in William Tell and when the Foreign Legionnaire heroes in Le Hommes Sans Nom (The Men with No Name) were shot by Moroccan insurgents.’⁷

In addition, the Jewish population’s relationship with the rest of the pied-noir population often mirrored tensions present in France: as one account puts it, for European settlers, ‘anti-Semitism tapped into […] perceptions of themselves as ordinary, hard-working people. Jews were held up as a rich and exploitative breed intent on dominating French Algeria.’⁸ Derrida’s grandmother, for instance, had to marry ‘clandestinely in the back courtyard of a town hall in Algeria, because of the pogroms (this was in the middle of the Dreyfus affair).’⁹ Despite the clandestine wedding, Jackie’s grandmother was part of an ‘extraordinary transformation of French Judaism in Algeria’. Where the generation before had been close to the Arab population in language and customs, she was ‘already raising her daughters like bourgeois Parisian girls (16th Arrondissement good manners, piano lessons, and so on)’.¹⁰ Then, writes Derrida,

came my parents’ generation: few intellectuals, mostly shopkeepers, some of modest means and some not, and some who were already exploiting a colonial situation by becoming the exclusive representatives of major metropolitan brands: with a tiny little office and no secretary, one could, for example, become the sole distributor of all the ‘Marseille soap’ in Northern Africa (I’m of course simplifying a bit). Then came my generation (a majority of intellectuals: liberal professions, teaching, medicine, law, etc.).¹¹

This gradual assimilation – and, indeed, embourgoisement – of the Jewish population into Algerian French life saw forenames gallicised and Jewish religious sites and practices Christianised: ‘an insidious Christian contamination’, Derrida later called it. The synagogue was called the temple, bar-mitzvah called first communion and circumcision called baptism. Derrida later spoke of a quasi-subgroup, ‘indigenous Jews’, who could identify neither with the ‘models, norms or values’ of the French population, nor those of the Arab.¹²

This ‘disorder of identity’ could be staggering in its complexity. ‘In the milieu where I lived,’ Derrida wrote, ‘we called all non-Jewish French people “Catholics”, even if they were sometimes Protestants, or perhaps even Orthodox: “Catholic” meant anyone who was neither a Jew, a Berber nor an Arab.’ At the same time, settler anti-Semitism in Algeria fed anti-Semitism in France – Algerian Jews were seen as part of the ‘native peril’ – ‘Arabs of the Jewish faith.’¹³

It is, of course, biographically reductive to see in this mélange of identities, politics of naming, contested languages, contested selves and overlapping boundaries the origin of deconstruction – leaving aside Derrida’s problematising of ‘origin’. Asked in 1983 ‘where it all began’, Derrida responded, ‘Ay, you want me to say things like “I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but…” Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.’¹⁴

But he himself recognised precisely this question, writing in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, ‘A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it. But could I explain anything without it, ever? No, nothing.’¹⁵ Just as with every birth, the element of chance remains irreducible, so ‘a series of contingencies have made of me a French Jew from Algeria born in the generation before the “war of independence”: so many singularities, even among Jews, and even among the Jews of Algeria.’¹⁶ Identity, Derrida noted, ‘is never given, received or attained: only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures.’

Derrida would write that his ‘selfhood’ was thrice dissociated, fractured by three ‘interdicts’:

(1) First of all, it was cut off from both Arabic or Berber (more properly Maghrebian) language and culture. (2) It was also cut off from French, and even European language and culture, which, from its viewpoint, only constituted a distanced pole or metropole, heterogeneous to its history. (3) It was cut off, finally, or to begin with, from Jewish memory, and from the history and language that one must presume to be their own, but which, at a certain point, no longer was. At least not in a typical way for the majority of its members, and not in a sufficiently ‘lively’ and internal way.¹⁷

Life was elsewhere, and

elsewhere … meant in the Metropole. In the Capital-City-Mother-Fatherland. Sometimes, we would say ‘France,’ but mostly ‘the Metropole,’ at least in the official language, in the imposed rhetoric of discourses, newspapers, and school. As for my family, and almost always elsewhere, we used to say ‘France’ among ourselves. (‘Those people can afford vacations in France’; ‘that person is going to study in France’; ‘he is going to take the waters in France, generally at Vichy’; ‘this teacher is from France’; ‘this cheese is from France.’) … A place of fantasy, therefore, at an ungraspable distance. As a model of good speech and good writing, it represented the language of the master.¹⁸

And not the language of his neighbours ‘the Arabs’, their language being ‘a strange kind of alien language as the language of the other … a hidden frontier, at once invisible and impassable: the segregation was as efficacious as it was subtle’,¹⁹ so that they were ‘very near and infinitely far away, such was the distance that experience instilled in us, so to speak. Unforgettable and generalizable.’²⁰

Derrida did not forget, and throughout his life generalised about this hidden frontier, finding it in politics, ethics, language, sentences, words. ‘The splitting of the ego in me at least,’ he writes in ‘Circumfession’, ‘is no transcendental claptrap.’²¹ The right to self-possession and the ability to make meaning from a position of dominance, security and strength were, from childhood, disputed. He was, as he put it in one of his last interviews, ‘a sort of child in the margins of Europe, a child of the Mediterranean, who was not simply French nor simply African, and who passed his time traveling between one culture and the other feeding questions he asked himself out of that instability’.²² Analysing himself, Derrida wrote that ‘The absence of a stable model of identification for an ego – in all its dimensions, linguistic, cultural and so on – give rise to impulses that are always on the brink of collapse … under the guise of radical destructuring.’²³

In 1934, shortly before the birth of Jackie’s sister, Janine, the Derridas moved from rue Saint-Augustin to 13 rue d’Aurelle-de-Paladines in the district of El-Biar (the Well), an affluent suburb on the outskirts of Algiers. The house was located ‘on the edge of an Arab district and a Catholic cemetery’ and remained the Derridas’ home until they fled to France in 1962, having only just managed to pay it off. The four-year-old Jackie Derrida was, by all accounts, a charming boy, who wore a boater and sang Maurice Chevalier songs, in a house dominated by his maternal grandmother.²⁴

This idyll ended when Jackie went to school, where racial tensions manifested themselves physically in violence and the threat of violence, including ‘anti-Arab racism, anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Spanish racism’. School also meant separation from his mother, who would take him in and then leave him with his teachers – ‘monsters of abstraction’ as he would call them.

The first years of nursery school were a tragedy. I cried every single day in school. Before nursery school it was absolutely traumatic for me. It was like a repeated trauma every day for me. I remember it, it was absolutely terrible. And I have to say in a certain way it never ended. Throughout my life, even to today, I’ve never liked school.²⁵

At school he learned the history of France, of which he was assured he was a citizen, yet not a word about Algeria.²⁶ Algeria existed as a land of homologues – streets named rue Michelet and avenue Georges-Clemenceau, regions named Burgundy and Bordeaux, while the academic year was the French one. ‘Deep down, I wonder whether one of my first and imposing figures of spectrality, of spectrality itself, was not France; I mean everything that bore its name.’²⁷

This immersion in the ‘overthere’, as Derrida later referred to France, started, inevitably, with language. While students did have the option of learning Arabic, ‘French was a language supposed to be maternal,’ but this was a mother tongue ‘whose source, norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere’. The one language that young Jackie possessed – or which possessed him – was not his own, it was the language of the coloniser.²⁸

It was nonetheless the language he would come to love. ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘that if I love this language like I love my life, and sometimes more than certain native French do, it is because I love it as a foreigner who has been welcomed, and who has appropriated this language for himself as the only possible language for him.’²⁹ This Oedipal, ambivalent love explained ‘why there is in my writing a certain, I wouldn’t say perverse but somewhat violent, way of treating this language. Out of love. Love in general passes by way of the love of language … You don’t just go and do anything with language; it pre-exists us and it survives us.³⁰

And yet the original scar still worked within it throughout his life and work:

My attachment to the French language takes forms that I sometimes consider ‘neurotic’. I feel lost outside the French language. The other languages which, more or less clumsily, I read, decode, or sometimes speak, are languages I shall never inhabit … Not only am I lost, fallen, and condemned outside the French language, I have the feeling of honoring or serving all idioms, in a word, of writing the ‘most’ and the ‘best’ when I sharpen the resistance of my French, the secret ‘purity’ of my French, the one I was speaking about earlier on, hence its resistance, its relentless resistance to translation; translation into all languages, including another such French.³¹

But while the French language ‘provided a model, a uniform and a uniformity, a habitus, and one had to conform to it’, its sovereignty was not absolute – Derrida recalls that he and his classmates made fun of a teacher who actually came ‘from the Metropole’ – finding his accent ridiculous.

Here, in the complex relationship Jackie had with language, we see the performative space in which the philosopher Jacques Derrida carried out his task, problematising terms such as habitus, home, the gift, the promise, hospitality, writing and speech. ‘Deconstruction’, he wrote, ‘is always deeply concerned with the “other” of language … The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the “other” and the “other of language”.’³² If he was forced into the French language, so he would become the one to make ‘said language come to him, forcing the language then to speak itself by itself, in another way, in his language.’³³

If school was a tragedy, worse was to follow. In March 1940, his younger brother, Norbert, died of tubercular meningitis. Jackie now had dead brothers on either side. Then his beloved cousin, Jean-Pierre, one year older than him, also died, hit by a car, the shock magnified as he was initially told it was his oldest brother who had died. These events would always haunt Derrida. It was not until many years after the birth of his sons that suddenly he recognised the significance of his naming them Pierre and Jean. The place of ghosts in his philosophy is not inexplicable.

Despite the war having little initial impact in Algeria, anti-Semitism found fertile ground in the Maghreb, with the National Revolution called for by Pétain’s Vichy government being embraced with fervour by local leaders. Soon after the German annexation of France, Jews were forbidden from practising certain jobs, quotas were introduced for the civil service and ‘liberal professions’ and the press threatened that synagogues would be subjected to ‘sulphur, pitch, and if possible the fires of hell’ to drive the Jews out ‘like rabid dogs’.³⁴ In spite of finishing top of the class, which should have won him the honour of raising the flag at morning assembly, ten-year-old Jackie was replaced by a non-Jewish student.³⁵

On 7 October 1940, the Crémieux Decree, and therefore French citizenship, was revoked, resulting in some 120,00 Jews of Algeria becoming non-citizens. This was not a decision imposed by the National Socialists, as Derrida was always at pains to point out: ‘The withdrawal of French citizenship from the Jews of Algeria, with everything that followed, was the deed of the French alone. They decided that all by themselves, in their heads; they must have been dreaming about it all along; they implemented it all by themselves.’³⁶

In September 1941, quotas were also introduced into schools: only 14 per cent of children could be Jewish, a system not implemented in France proper. Then in October 1942 the quota was reduced from 14 to 7 per cent. Jackie – ‘a little black, very Arab Jew’ – was summoned into the office of ‘the only school official whose name I remember today,’ who said to him, ‘You are going home, my little friend, your parents will get a note.’³⁷ For Derrida this was ‘an earthquake’, ‘a natural catastrophe for which there was no explanation’.³⁸ The decision reflected the virulence of Algerian/Vichy anti-Semitism. ‘The wound’, wrote Derrida, ‘was of another order, and it never healed: the daily insults from the children, my classmates, the kids in the street, and sometimes the threats or blows aimed at the “dirty Jew”, which, I might say, I came to see myself as.’³⁹

It is, as Fanon argued, ‘the racist who creates his inferior’;⁴⁰ or, more specifically, in the words of Sartre, ‘The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew, that is the simple truth from which we must start … it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.’⁴¹ Before his expulsion Derrida’s identification with Judaism had been, one might say, sufficient but not necessary. Made a ‘Jew’, and unmade from being French, Derrida was suddenly forced to study at an exclusively Jewish school, set up by Jewish teachers who had themselves been forced out of their teaching positions by the quotas. From day one, he hated it.

Immediately I felt uneasy about belonging, about being part of this Jewish, closed and communitarian identity. I was twelve at the time, I was twelve, and at the same time I rejected, of course, the antisemitic and racist environment and I rejected in some way, in some interior and subtle way, rejected the Jewish community.⁴²

His resistance in having to identify by fiat as Jewish was further complicated by his feeling that a clandestine part of his self was being handed over. ‘I have’, he wrote,

often presented myself, barely playing, like a Marrano, one of those Jews converted by force in Spain and Portugal, who cultivated their Judaism in secret, at times to the extent of not knowing what it consisted in. This theme has also interested me from a political point of view. When a State does not respect the right to the secret, it becomes threatening: police violence, inquisition, totalitarianism.⁴³

Or, more pithily, ‘Belonging – the fact of avowing one’s belonging, of putting in common – be it family, nation, tongue – spells the loss of a secret.’⁴⁴

The idea of the ‘secret’ is important in Derrida’s later explorations of identity, individual and collective, in works such as The Gift of Death, with its meditations on Abraham and Isaac. As a philosopher, Derrida was no atheist, and Jewish themes and questions were central to the fabric of his work. This is overt in works such as A Silkworm of One’s Own, in which he teases out his emotional and metaphorical relationship to the tallith, the prayer shawl which his maternal grandfather gave him, and crucially it informs his discourse around Judaism disrupting Greek thought in such key works as ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. His work is also full of terms that carry with them Jewish connotations: the veil, Messianism and destinerrance – that roaming which is part of language, part of life, where the destination is never reached so the roaming becomes the destination – which echoes the story of the Wandering Jew. And, as his translator and collaborator Geoffrey Bennington notes dryly, ‘Certain readers have noticed a stylistic family resemblance between Derrida’s writings and the interminable commentaries of the Talmudists.’⁴⁵

Jackie’s expulsion lasted less than a year. On 8 November 1942, Allied Forces landed on the coast near Algiers and, in coordination with the Géo Gras Group, a mainly Jewish arm of Algeria’s French Resistance, retook Algeria as part of their annexing of West Africa as a launching point for offensives in Southern Europe. Jackie celebrated their arrival, the return of their films, all the things that ‘made them powerful (including as a dream) music, dance, cigarettes.’⁴⁶

Algiers became, virtually overnight, the capital of Free France. But the Jewish population had to wait until October 1943 for the Crémieux Decree to be reinstated, an act Derrida again found disconcerting.

Then, one day, ‘one fine day’, without, once again, my asking for anything, and still too young to know it in a properly political way, I found the aforementioned citizenship again. The state, to which I never spoke, had given it back to me. The state, which was no longer Pétain’s ‘French State’, was recognizing me anew. That was, I think, in 1943; I had still never gone ‘to France’; I had never been there.⁴⁷

Citizenship – its meaning, limits, and the power of states and nations to grant or revoke it – would remain a crucial question in Derrida’s philosophy and politics, and his later interventions in, for instance, Israel and Palestine, his passionate engagement with South Africa in the struggle against apartheid, and with any ‘group that finds itself one day deprived, as a group, of its citizenship by a state that, with the brutality of a unilateral decision, withdraws it without asking for their opinion, and without the said group gaining back any other citizenship.’⁴⁸

The other anti-Semitic laws were overturned on 14 March 1943, and in April Jackie was allowed to return to the Lycée Ben Aknoun. It was now also a military hospital and POW camp for Italians, so classes were conducted in huts elsewhere in the school grounds. Jackie, who had regularly bunked off from the Jewish school, became by his own admission a bad student, spending his time playing sport, chasing girls and visiting the cinema. ‘For a sedentary little kid from Algiers, cinema offered an extraordinary boon of travel.’⁴⁹

But if Jackie was not passionate about school, he was soon passionate about reading. He encountered as a teenager many of the writers who were to inform his life’s work – Gide, Proust, Rousseau, Valéry, Camus, and Artaud. He identified particularly with the latter, finding himself in sympathy ‘with that man who said that he had nothing to say … while at the same time he was inhabited by the passion and the drive to write.’ But these writers still described the world of ‘overthere’ – ‘the discovery of French literature, the access to this so unique mode of writing that is called “French-literature” was the experience of a world without any tangible continuity with the one in which we lived, with almost nothing in common with our natural or social landscapes’.⁵⁰

In the febrile atmosphere of wartime Algeria, literature provided Jackie with a medium which, by its very nature, disrupted power.

Literature seemed to me, in a confused way, to be the institution which allows one to say everything, in every way. The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law. It therefore allows one to think the essence of the law in the experience of this ‘everything to say’. It is an institution which tends to overflow the institution.⁵¹

Operating within a matrix of laws contested from above and below, which, as the revocation and reinstatement of his citizenship had shown, were often arbitrary, literature subverted this matrix, and opened a space for resistance. ‘As an adolescent, I no doubt had the feeling that I was living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that were not allowed.’⁵²

The overthrow of Vichy France in September 1944 did little to ease tension within Algeria as ‘French liberation’ was, again, partial – les indigents gained little from it. The Derridas again found themselves as both the oppressors and the oppressed. ‘Racism was everywhere at the time. Being Jewish and a victim of anti-Semitism didn’t spare one the anti-Arab racism I felt everywhere around me, in manifest or latent form.’⁵³ On 8 May 1945, Arab nationalists in the town of Sétif held a demonstration marking France’s liberation from Germany. Someone fired a shot and protesters murdered more than one hundred French residents. In response, during five days of violence more than 15,000 Arabs and Berbers were killed. In addition, 4,500 arrests were made and 99 death penalties handed down.

In 1947 Jackie failed the first part of his baccalaureate, which, his older brother René noted, finally jolted him out of his complacency.⁵⁴ This was also when Jackie discovered philosophy, reading Bergson, Nietzsche and, intensely, Sartre. He found himself ‘in a certain ecstatic bedazzlement’ as he read the latter’s Nausea, a book he would continue to admire throughout his life. He also immersed himself in Being and Nothingness, reading it at the local Algiers library. Despite his later criticisms of Sartre (‘not a very powerful philosopher, not a very good writer’), he always recognised his debt to this initial encounter.⁵⁵

Sartrean existentialism, with its appeal to the real issues of everyday life, its focus on individual responsibility and authenticity, and its atheism, was, in a world emerging from war, very much in vogue, and Derrida’s surviving teenage essays in philosophy are awash with Sartrean language – ‘pour-soi’, ‘en-soi’, ‘angoisse’ – as he grappled with such things as the difference between existence and essence. His earliest surviving essay is called ‘Moral Experience’, a thoroughly Sartrean title and field of investigation. As late as his first year at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he was being advised ‘not to imitate existentialist language too slavishly’.⁵⁶

Sartre also represented the possibility of allying philosophy and literature at a time when the seventeen-year-old Jackie found himself torn between the two. He later joked that his choice of the former was a pragmatic one – the money was better.⁵⁷ For all that, his corpus, by his own admission, combined them. ‘I’m amused by the idea that my adolescent desire – let’s call it that – should have directed me toward something in writing which was neither one nor the other.’⁵⁸

Passing his baccalaureate on the second attempt, Jackie – in a moment straight out of a bad movie – was still undecided as to what to do next when he happened to hear a programme on Radio Algiers offering career advice. The programme mentioned a place that was ‘overthere’ – the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. Jackie decided immediately that it was what he wanted.

Enrolling in a hypokhâgne – essentially a crammer’s course – at the Lycée Bugeaud, where Camus had also studied, he took philosophy under Jan Czarnecki, who, despite his dry method, as he guided his students from the pre-Socratics to the modern day, Derrida later called ‘remarkable’.⁵⁹

Derrida immediately joined the Cogito Club, an after-school philosophy group, where students presented papers on subjects they themselves found interesting. It was here that he first became acquainted with three philosophers who shaped his life: Hegel, Heidegger and, crucially, Edmund Husserl, whose Cartesian Meditations had been translated into French by Emmanuel Lévinas in 1931. Despite the philosophical intimacy Derrida later shared with Husserl, he initially found his work ‘frigid’, preferring Heidegger, whose What Is Metaphysics? he devoured, noting that ‘The question of anguish, of the experience of nothingness prior to negation suited my personal sense of pathos.’⁶⁰

Two of Derrida’s essays from the Club survive. The first is on Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s intentionality and the ‘natural attitude’ – which, as we shall see, are precisely the contested points that later generated Derrida’s own philosophical work. The second is on Heidegger, whom Derrida accuses of using:

Noisy, pretentious and heavy dialect … [a] crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous, this reverse precocity, consists in deadening and complicating his language, as if for fun, and in giving the most everyday, the simplest of faults an air of profundity.⁶¹

Derrida’s prejudices against this sort of writing were, one might point out, not ongoing.

Jackie excelled at his hypokhâgne – but life remained elsewhere. For his second year – the khâgne – Derrida knew he had to leave Algeria and cross the Mediterranean to Paris. He applied for, and won a place at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, alma mater of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Verlaine, Diderot, as well as Robespierre and de Sade, Chirac and Pompidou.

Jackie was to be boarder 424, and he would be utterly miserable.

‘From Algiers, the white city, I arrived in Paris, the black city.’⁶² Black, and grey – Paris in September 1949 was far from the city of the nineteen-year-old Jackie’s dreams. While suffering less bomb damage than many other Allied cities, Paris was run down and exhausted only four years after the occupation, and thirteen years before the then culture minister André Malraux’s introduction of laws to maintain and restore its historical buildings.

The trip from Algiers to Marseilles – the first time Jackie had left Algeria, the first time he had set foot in France – was traumatic. He was seasick, and spent the entire passage vomiting. For all that he was later to theorise the disputed nature of boundaries, the symbolism of moving across this one could not have been more starkly represented.

At Lycée Louis-le-Grand the boys boarded in dormitories, washed in cold water and ate food so bad that some students went on hunger strikes. Unlike the day boys, the boarders wore grey smocks from morning to night, and their movements were subject to strict surveillance. The boys slept in large dormitories without curtains between the beds.⁶³

Despite the privations, Jackie continued to excel in philosophy. His teacher, Etienne Borne, while more traditional in his philosophical interests than Czarnecki, was not untouched by the existentialism of the time. Nonetheless, as a Christian Democrat and one of the founders of the Christian-democratic Mouvement républicain populaire, he attempted to overcome existentialism’s atheism in works such as The Problem of Evil, and the emphatically named God Is Not Dead.

Borne’s religious concerns opened new areas of thinking for Jackie. His essays of the time seek to push back against the nihilism that is arguably implicit in existentialism – the position that life is absurd and therefore meaningless. For Jackie, if philosophy tended to this conclusion, it was a fault in philosophy or, more precisely, it was a ‘characteristic’ of philosophy. Life itself does not tend to this nihilistic conclusion, unless, for instance, the waters are muddied by philosophy. Analysing the most nihilistic of actions, suicide, Jackie argued that, in assuming the divine power to choose between life and death, I assert my own value. What appears most nihilistic therefore is not nihilistic. Man, wrote Jackie, is condemned to be an optimist. Consciously or not, his argument echoes that of Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, with its opening line, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’, and its conclusion, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ This was also Derrida’s first foray into regarding philosophy as a narrative, where its very form implies its conclusions.⁶⁴

Two other thinkers were of particular importance to Jackie at this point. The first was the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, whose two-volume The Mystery of Being attempted to distinguish between a ‘problem’, which exists independently of any individual and can be solved, and a ‘mystery’, which is one’s own, and cannot. Life for Marcel is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

The other was Simone Weil, whose Christian mysticism, in the strongest sense of that term, seemed to move him profoundly – he often gave Gravity and Grace as a present to friends.⁶⁵ Weil argued, if that is the right term given her numinous, aphoristic style, that human life is marked by ‘gravity’ and it is only by receiving God’s gift – grace – that we can be redeemed and life’s questions, which are beyond our understanding, can be answered.

Weil was one of the first women to attend the ENS, famously finishing first in her entrance exam ahead of second-placed Simone de Beauvoir. After experiencing a revelation while reading George Herbert’s ‘Love III’ (‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back’), she converted from Judaism to Catholicism – although she was never baptised, in part because she believed herself unworthy, in part in solidarity with the ‘lost souls in hell’. She was extreme in how she lived her philosophy, which contributed to her early death at the age of thirty-four – despite her physical frailty she worked in an auto factory to understand the debilitating effects of factory work; and while living in the United States she starved herself during the war in solidarity with those left in France.

Jackie took up Weil’s notion that we are powerless to save ourselves, writing that a way was needed beyond philosophy – with its tendency towards nihilism – but which did not, unlike Weil’s position, reject philosophy outright but surpassed it in a way that ‘would also be a return to existence enriched and purified by reflection’. This existence was in Sartrean terms ‘être-pour-soi’, or ‘being-for-itself’. Jackie again equated this with the idea of a ‘secret’ – not one that we choose to keep, but one which we cannot communicate.⁶⁶ While these are the sophomore essays of a nineteen-year-old, again the consistency of Jackie’s stance is remarkable. Already some of the main themes of his mature work are present – the idea of philosophy as one narrative among others, with its own characteristics and structural requirements unrelated to the object of its enquiry, a fealty to religious ways of thinking, and a fascination with aporias, those irresolvable internal contradictions which, to Derrida, raise questions of their own about the premises of our argument.

The essays also contain a certain optimism that continued to mark his work whatever his personal circumstances, which even he himself was surprised by

the obscure chance, my good fortune, a gift for which thanks should be given to goodness knows what archaic power, is that it was always easier for me to bless this destiny. Much easier, more often than not, and even now, to bless than to curse it. The day I would get to know to whom gratitude must be rendered for it, I would know everything, and I would be able to die in peace.⁶⁷

At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand this optimism continued to be sorely tested. He wrote to his friend Michel Monory that he was ‘not able to produce anything other than tears … I’m almost at the end of my tether, Michel, pray for me.’ His reading remained resolutely melancholy, including Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Gide’s Strait Is the Gate.⁶⁸

He again sought solace in the cinema, which acted as ‘a drug, entertainment par excellence, uneducated escape, the right to wildness’. For Jackie, as for the man he would become, ‘the movies are a hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous joy – in other words, an infantile pleasure’. While cinema never became ‘a form of knowledge, or even a real memory’, he saw parallels between filmic style and deconstructive writing – both adopting ‘all the possibilities of montage, that is, of plays with the rhythms, of grafts of quotations, insertions, changes in tone, changes in language, crossings between “disciplines” and the rules of art, the arts.’⁶⁹

The cinema was also a place of spectrality, phantoms, and, as he later punned on ontology, ‘hauntology’. Film lets one see ‘new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen … Let’s say that cinema needed to be invented to fulfil a certain desire for relation to ghosts.’⁷⁰ And film shares what we might call a certain consanguinity with psychoanalysis.

If his struggles in France were not enough, Jackie found his trips back to Algeria in the holidays ‘gloomy and impossible.’ For all its terrors, the stimulation of Paris left Algeria ‘a real drag, terribly monotonous’ and the people he knew to be ‘of no interest’. The political situation remained tense – while the 1947 Statute of Algeria had granted French citizenship to all Algerian men, the creation of the Algerian Assembly, split into a house for the minority Europeans and ‘meritorious’ Arabs, and a house for the remaining eight million Muslims, did nothing to appease those who rose up in 1954.

While Jackie’s brilliance at philosophy already provoked the sort of reactions his later work garnered – ‘I confess I find this really difficult to follow,’ wrote one teacher, ‘remember the reader’ – in other subjects he showed little talent.⁷¹ He was okay at French and History-Geography but appalling at languages – English, German and Latin – scoring just 2.5/20 in the latter. His difficulties with languages were to last his whole life, a perpetual embarrassment, particularly once he had achieved worldwide fame with a philosophy that put language and its translation at centre stage.

Jackie failed his written examinations at the end of his first year. This was not unusual at the khâgne, but his marks were so low that he was not even eligible for the oral exams that followed (where one of the examiners would have been Merleau-Ponty). He was not only undone by weakness in certain subjects. He was also resorting to that great staple of students over the years, amphetamines bought over the counter, which disturbed his sleep to the extent that he kept nodding off during the exams. In his second year he repeated the same mistakes, this time being forced to abandon the first paper, handing in a blank sheet.

Jackie then had a new philosophy teacher, Maurice Savin, whose lectures were peppered with allusions to Proust, Freud and Bachelard. While recognising Jackie’s natural ability, Savin was open about his frustration with Jackie’s increasingly dense style. ‘There is undeniably a philosopher lurking in there somewhere,’ he wrote, ‘despite your over-specialised, hermetic language.’⁷² One examiner was even more blunt: ‘The answers are brilliant in the very same way that they are obscure … [he] can come back when he’s prepared to accept the rules and not invent.’⁷³ Again the child would be father to the man.

In his third year, Jackie moved off site. While still anxious, and still taking amphetamines (albeit fewer), he worked harder, bringing his other subjects up to an acceptable level, and reaching new levels in philosophy. ‘Reliably brilliant results; a definite philosophical personality; you must succeed,’ Borne wrote.⁷⁴ He passed his written exams, and finally undertook the dreaded oral, where he was asked to speak on a page of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. ‘I deployed all my resources to uncover a range of meanings fanning out from each sentence, each word,’ he wrote. ‘I invented a Diderot who was a virtuoso of litotes, a maverick of literature, a resistance fighter from the word go.’⁷⁵ He scraped through, but he fell back ten places from his position after the written exams. In the exasperated words of one of the examiners, ‘Look, this text is quite simple, you’ve simply made it more complicated and laden with meaning, by adding ideas of your own.’⁷⁶

Jackie passed. At twenty-two he was to enter the École normale supérieure. It was to be his home, off and on, for the next thirty years.