An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
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