#eaki

Still, the underlying intuition—that in Derrida’s abstractions was a powerful story about the experience of being shut out and unheard—may have been sound. He laced his work with elliptical allusions to his life, and composed at least one explicitly autobiographical work, “Circumfession,” (1993). (In it, he mentions his brother Paul, who died before he was born and whom Derrida replaced as youngest son: “from this I always got the feeling of being an excluded favorite, of both father and mother…excluded and favorite at two juxtaposed moments…and it is still going on.”) He also referred to philosophers’ lives in his own work, citing at length in Glas (1974), for example, in a discussion of Hegel’s view of the family, letters Hegel wrote to his sister and fiancée. Shortly before his death, Derrida told an interviewer, I am among those few people who have constantly drawn attention to this: you must (and you must do it well) put philosophers’ biographies back in the picture, and the commitments, particularly political commitments, that they sign in their own names, whether in relation to Heidegger or equally to Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, or Blanchot, and so on. How he imagined his own biography would be used to illuminate his theory is hard to say. The epigraph of Peeters’ book, a line from “Circumfession,” is, in typical Derridean fashion, instructive caution: “No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.”