Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew
Brown
Polity, 629 pp, £25.00, November, ISBN 978 0 7456 5615 1
‘Anyone reading these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques
Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood
everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them,
while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you
can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future
biographers, think again. Derrida worried that the diaries might one day be
privileged over his philosophical writing or, worse, used as a way of ‘finally’
steering through the obstacles he had consciously placed between himself and
his readers.
