The Interpreters of Maladies (Page 4)

Like Rodinson, Jacques Derrida was profoundly troubled by what he described as "the disastrous and suicidal policies of Israel--and of a certain Zionism." This sense of torment, of being at odds with so many of his fellow Jews, meant that "I have a hard time saying 'we.'" Yet, "in spite of all this and all the problems I have with my own 'Jewishness,' I will never deny it.... This tortured 'we,'" he added, "is at the heart of all that is most disquieting in my thought."

Unlike Rodinson, Derrida came from the Muslim world, a native of El Biar in French colonial Algeria. The Egyptian-Jewish writer Edmund Jabès, he would later write, "teaches us that roots speak, that words want to grow, and that poetic discourse takes root in a wound." Derrida's poetic discourse grew out of the wound of his traumatic exile from Algeria, which he left for Paris at age 19 to attend the École Normale Supérieure. The link between an author's work and his biography is, to be sure, complex, and sometimes tenuous, and Derrida long shied away from discussing his personal life, and from even having his picture taken. But in his last years he finally began to speak of his Algerian childhood, of being a Jew in a colonial society, and acknowledged that "my own life and desires are inscribed in all of my writing."

The son of a salesman, he was born Jackie Derrida (he later adopted a "correct" French version of his name) in 1930. The Derridas were Spanish Sephardim who fled to Algeria during the Inquisition. (In his work Derrida expressed a special kinship with Marrand, a fourteenth-century Jew who practiced his religion in secret.) Neither European settlers nor Muslims, they were a people-in-between, raising suspicions on both sides of the progressively hardening native-settler divide. The predicament of Algeria's Jews, who numbered more than 100,000 by the mid-twentieth century, had been further complicated by the 1870 Crémieux Decrees, which granted them French citizenship--a reform that elicited furious protests from anti-Semitic pieds noirs, while driving a wedge between Jewish Algerians and the disenfranchised Muslim majority, with whom they had enjoyed peaceful relations for centuries.

"I took part in an extraordinary transformation of French Judaism in Algeria," Derrida recalled in a recent interview. "My great-grandparents were still very close to the Arabs by language, customs, etc. After the Crémieux Decrees...the next generation became bourgeois: although she was married almost secretly in the backyard of the mayor of Algiers because of the pogroms during the Dreyfus Affair, my grandmother raised her daughters as if they were bourgeois Parisians, with the good manners of the 16th arrondissement." By the time Derrida was born, the family spoke neither Ladino nor Arabic but French, having passionately assimilated the language of their colonizers. "That is why," he explained, "there is in my writing a somewhat violent, not to say perverse, way of treating this language. Because of love...I only have one language, and at the same time this language does not belong to me."

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