After Derrida

I was invited to participate in this counter-obituary, and I did not hesitate one instant, something that does not happen very often. The reason I didn’t hesitate is because at stake is someone who was close to me: Jacques Derrida. And the reason I was invited to contribute is linked to the recent development of certain forms of “revisionism,” increasingly present in media coverage in Europe as well as in the United States.

Let me begin by clarifying some factual questions. My familiarity with Derrida’s thought is not exactly recent. In October, 1969—thus roughly thirty-five years ago on the morning of his death—I first knocked on the door of his small office in the rue d’Ulm. I must have been carrying De la grammatologie under my arm at the time. In his Comédie (1997), Bernard-Henri Lévy recounts a similar scene, which in his case took place a year earlier. For good reason: both of us had just passed the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure, we were both philosophers, and we both had to introduce ourselves to the person who, in his official capacity as “agrégé-répétiteur,” otherwise known as “caïman” (the strange nickname of the “agrégé-répétiteurs”), would henceforth preside over the evolution of our philosophical studies all the way through the “agrégation”—in other words, for the next three years. There was an important difference, nonetheless, between Bernard-Henry Lévy and me: for unfathomably complex family reasons (somewhere between Lévy and Derrida there was a vague cousin about whom it would have been better not to speak that day), the first meeting between my comrade and the young philosopher (Derrida was only 38 years old at the time) went rather badly, and they were never able to find common ground after that. In the autumn of 1969, on the contrary, my meeting with Derrida went well (since we had no family ties), and this allowed me to become a contented student of the brilliant professor, whose class I never once missed during the next three years, and then to develop, progressively and later in life, a relation of friendship with him.