An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
a year at Harvard not making any progress, then two years back teaching high school in Algeria as part of his military service, and was lecturing at the ENS under the tutelage of his old teacher Louis Althusser. Married, with one child, his only book consisted of an introduction to Husserl’s On the Origin of Geometry, published five years earlier. While a number of the essays which were to make up his first major contribution, Writing and Difference, had been published, they had received only moderate attention. His lecture series, including ‘Heidegger and the question of Being and history’ and ‘The theory of meaning in [Husserl’s] Logical Investigations and Ideas I’, though esteemed at the academy, were out of step with a philosophy department where bright young Marxist things such as Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey were caught up in the heady excitement surrounding Althusser’s For Marx and the collective Reading Capital, far away from Derrida’s obscure concerns with phenomenology. Both Marxism and structuralism, broadly speaking, regarded phenomenology as theoretically regressive, centred as it was on the ‘subject’, which both discourses were working to overcome.
At the time, Derrida felt he was making little progress, and later described his ‘solitude’ and ‘reclusiveness’.22 ‘I have the impression’, he wrote to Althusser, ‘that I can see pearls out of reach, like a fisherman afraid of the water even though he’s a connoisseur of pearls.’23 And yet … in part Derrida’s reticence – his fear even – was because he knew he was doing something new.
In 1965 two small articles of his were published in Cahiers pour l’analyse (one of the copious short-lived reviews generated at the time), one on Lévi-Strauss, and one on the Essay on the Origin of Languages by Rousseau. In the same letter to Althusser, he mentioned ‘this little text on writing’ he was working on, which would become ‘Writing before the letter’, which did indeed cause something of a stir on publication in two parts in Critique. This would become the first section in Of Grammatology, and the two smaller pieces were the germ for the rest of the book.
None of this added up to the sort of influence which would even get him invited to a colloquy such as the Baltimore one, let alone point to the possibility that he would overturn the entire philosophy it presumed to celebrate. And yet in less than an hour this is precisely what he did, and the obscure teaching assistant from Algeria was the most talked about philosopher in the world.
Something had just happened. An event, perhaps?
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