Derrida: la Vie et l’Oeuvre

My encounter with Derrida was organized around Circonfession. This text occupies a very distinctive place within his body of work. It seems to me that its problematic object more or less determined the conditions of our dialogue. Indeed, this “more or less” defines the space of a philosophical question that Jacques Derrida helped pose, I believe, in a quite original manner—at least within the domain of philosophy.

In this process, Derrida’s texts, as I have always read them, are doomed to be embodied (in the form of encounters, dialogues, protests, doubts). Therein undoubtedly lies the secret of a certain fervor, which became manifest spontaneously and in multiple forms after October 9, 2004. I heard in circles around me and read at the time what I myself had always observed and felt—namely, that Jacques Derrida’s life was inseparable from his work, that our tears also had a philosophical meaning—those very tears that Circonfession works so hard to bring into the realm of thought.

What I retain from this stunning book (hardly a book, in fact—more a series of annotations at the bottom of the page), from this commentary in the form of an autobiography (or this autobiography in the form of a commentary—the whole question is there), what I retain is the thesis—formulated with sufficient resolve to constitute henceforth a problem—that the biographical event (here circumcision) determines the nature, the scope, the acuteness of philosophical questioning and proposition.