An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
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