Benoît Peeters > Quotes

“The review L’Arc, meanwhile, wished to devote a complete issue to Derrida. Catherine Clément submitted a list of contributors in which there were more writers than philosophers in the traditional sense: Hélène Cixous, François Laruelle, Claude Ollier, Roger Laporte, Edmond Jabès, and so on.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Avital Ronell – a committed vegetarian – relates that one day, at a dinner with Chantal and René Major, she let one dish go by without taking a helping, which caused a certain embarrassment. When she said she had perfectly decent philosophical reasons for not eating meat, Derrida turned to ask her what they were. So Avital told him what it meant to her to incorporate the body of the other. Shortly afterwards, Derrida, who was extraordinarily receptive to this kind of thing, started to speak of carnophallogocentrism rather than phallogocentrism. Later on, with me and in front of me, he said he was a vegetarian. But one day, someone told me he had eaten a steak tartare, as carnivorous a kind of food as you can get. For me, it was as if he had betrayed me. When I spoke to him about it, he initially said I was behaving like a cop. Then he said, neatly: ‘I’m a vegetarian who sometimes eats meat.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“After dinners in Ris-Orangis, Derrida would gladly offer to drive home any guests without transport. He enjoyed driving, and always went into Paris by car. He’d learned when still very young, on the job, with his father’s car. But since he had never studied the highway code, he had his own ideas about it, which could sometimes lead to spectacular results. He considered, for example, that most ‘no entry’ signs did not actually apply to him, and that big roads should automatically have priority over smaller ones. At the wheel, he rapidly lost his cool. In traffic jams, he could almost get hysterical. And, to crown it all, whenever he stopped for even a short time he would start taking notes. In a letter to Éric Clémens, he indicated in a PS: ‘Excuse the handwriting, I’m writing in the car (what a life!), but I’ve stopped, not even at a red light. I’ve just thought of the title for a book: Written at a Red Light . . .’33 But while he was not a reassuring figure at the wheel, he never had an accident.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“The plane that had taken off from Baltimore was caught in bad weather, which meant the Derridas missed their connection at Boston. Derrida found this delay and the whole chaotic journey a real trial. On the flight the following day, he spent the whole time tense and hunched up, clenching his fists tightly. And when Marguerite coaxed him to relax, he replied, furiously: ‘Don’t you realize that I’m keeping the plane in the air by the sole force of my will?’ He was traumatized for a long time, and for several years he refused to get back into a plane.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Jean, his younger son, remembers a father who was almost always working:”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“He had a kind of urgent drive to be forever producing something, to get involved in more and more projects, to leave traces. To the people who, like Claire Nancy, rebuked him sometimes for publishing too much, he replied: ‘I can’t help it. It’s my way of fighting against death.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“In Derrida’s words, Anti-Oedipus was a ‘very bad book (confused, full of contorted disclaimers, etc.) but an important symptomatic event, to judge from the demand to which it is clearly meant to supply and the way it has been welcomed by a very broad and dubious sector of opinion’.29”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Les légendes sur le Palais sont innombrables: on dit que l'ensemble obéit à des principes ésotériques, qu'un coiffeur y tint secrètement salon des années durant, que les rares plans qui avaient survécu brûlèrent à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, qu'Orson Welles voulut y tourner Le Procès. Certains faits sont avérés: Léon Foucault y renouvela l'expérience du pendule et Adolf Hitler, grand admirateur de l'édifice, demanda à Speer d'en faire de minutieux croquis, au lendemain de l'invasion de la Belgique. De Poelaert, les habitants de Marolles gardèrent un souvenir qui s'est transmis jusqu'à nos jours. 'Architecte!' demeure l'une des insultes les plus graves dont on puisse se faire traiter.”
― Benoît Peeters, Les Cités obscures : Livre 2

“Derrida was particularly pained to see the story of his relationship with Sylviane exposed in two biographies of Jospin, long extracts from which were published in the press: one by Serge Raffy, the other by Claude Askolovitch. Derrida could not stand his image starting to resemble the most conventional soap opera.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Perhaps there were two areas he didn’t go into: clothes, and his relationship with women.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Admitting that his distance probably contained ‘a sort of crypto-Communist legacy’, Derrida spoke in more detail about his attitude to the student movement in his interview with Maurizio Ferraris: I did not say no to ‘68’, I took part in the demonstrations, I organized the first general assembly at the École Normale. Still, rightly or wrongly, my heart was not ‘on the barricades’. What really bothered me was not so much the apparent spontaneity, which I do not believe in, but the spontaneist political eloquence, the call for transparency, for communication without relay or delay, the liberation from every sort of apparatus, party or union. [. . .] Spontaneism, like workerism, pauperism, struck me as something to be wary of. I wouldn’t say my conscience is clear on this matter and that it’s as simple as that. These days [. . .], I would be more cautious about formulating this critique of spontaneism.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“While Derrida had frequently bumped into him, since their first encounters at the home of Maurice de Gandillac at the beginning of the 1950s, he had not really got to know him. Jean-Luc Nancy had dreamed of getting these two major philosophers into a discussion, but it never happened, and not just for contingent reasons.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“at the Catholic DePaul University, Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault were faithful translators as well as friends.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“I’m going to swim as much as possible. I’m in poor shape physically. I’ve put on weight (as always when I’m tired) and I feel as heavy as a bag of lead.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Derrida is convinced: the ‘Enlightenment to come’ should take the logic of the unconscious into account. This involves, for example, answering a question that in his view is essential and yet rarely asked: ‘Why does psychoanalysis never take root in the vast territory of Arabo-Islamic culture?’11 All these questions would seem even more urgent in the wake of 11 September the following year.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought. Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“When he read the text for the first time, Alan Bass, who was far from being a novice, had the impression that it would be as complicated as trying to translate Joyce into French. Derrida acknowledged that the ‘Envois’ were very encrypted and agreed to provide Bass with explanations, comments, and suggestions whenever required. ‘Most of this work was done by letter,’ Alan Bass recalls. He would send me my pages back with many annotations. But we had at least one long session together in a railway station buffet, while he was between trains. There were many details that would have escaped my notice if he hadn’t drawn my attention to them. For example, in the sentence ‘Est-ce taire un nom?’ [‘Is this to keep silence about a name?’], you also have to read ‘Esther’, which is one of the forenames of his mother, but also a biblical name that plays a very active part in the book. In spite of all my efforts, many of these effects disappeared in the translation.15 Hans-Joachim Metzger, the German translator of The Post Card, would find the work equally demanding. ‘On reading your questions,’ Derrida wrote to him, ‘I see yet again that you have read the text better than I have. That’s why a translator is absolutely unbearable, and the better he is, the scarier he is: the super-ego in person.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“But for some readers, especially Derrida’s closest friends, the allusions to reality at the centre of the ‘Envois’ seemed barely tolerable. Pierre remembers how he recoiled from the work. ‘When The Post Card was published, I sensed how much private life, how many disguised confidences, even how much exhibitionism there was in the book. I had no desire to be confronted with it, at any case in this form, and this no doubt played its part in the fact that I read relatively few of my father’s books.’18”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Ultimately, the only thing that sometimes annoyed Marguerite was Jacques’s jealous temperament. ‘He wasn’t happy when he couldn’t reach me straightaway.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“When consulted on one of the earliest texts by Alain Badiou, an article on Althusser, Derrida’s reply was both frank and open-minded: I’ve just read Badiou’s text. Like you yourself and Barthes, I find it at least irritating in its tone, the author’s pomposity, the ‘marks’ he hands out to everyone as if it were prize-giving or the Last Judgment. I still think that it’s important. [. . .] I don’t think there’s any doubt of this, and am all the more prepared to grant it this importance because I am far from feeling ‘philosophically’ ready to follow him in his arguments or his conclusions.5”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“She then laid more aggressively into her ex-partner and his philosophy, which she felt was disconnected from the reality that she had just experienced: In any case, philosophy too can put you in a bad mood: the Derridean concept of ‘unconditional hospitality’, for example. It is not merely absurd (though this still needs to be said), it is provocative. While it seems praiseworthy to defend illegal immigrants, this certainly cannot be done in the name of unconditional hospitality, since there is nothing more conditional than hospitality. The unconditional, in general, answers the longing of beautiful souls for the absolute and the pure. It is Kantian in inspiration, in other words it sacrifices the understanding of empirical reality to the purity of the concept. But it gives up the attempt to think through reality as it is.61”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Even though Spivak’s translation met with some criticism and had to be revised several times, Of Grammatology achieved astronomical sales of nearly 100,000 copies.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“As Marguerite Derrida puts it: ‘I’ve always thought that it was mainly through his capacity for listening that Jacques could seduce women.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Derrida had not seen the child again, apart from one completely chance encounter. One day, coming out of a plane in an airport in the south of France, he recognized Sophie Agacinski, Sylviane’s sister, and her husband Jean-Marc Thibault. Jacques was about to greet them when a young boy ran up to hug them. No doubt about it: this had to be Daniel, who had come to spend a few days’ holiday with his uncle and aunt. At the same moment, the three adults understood the situation: without knowing it, Daniel and Jacques had just been travelling in the same plane. As if at a loss, Derrida turned away.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“The time for argument was over: Foucault wanted to crush an enemy, even though he claimed he loathed this kind of attack, in one of his last interviews.*”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“In the middle of ‘Monicagate’, Bill Clinton himself used deconstruction in his own defence. Accused of lying when he had claimed not to have had sexual relations with the young intern, the President replied: ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is’ – a typically Derridean utterance.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“What was difficult to deal with was his permanent anxiety: when we were little, he was afraid we’d go and play outside or wander a bit too far away; later on, motorbikes and drugs were real nightmares for him. When he was angry, this was always due to anxiety, especially if we came home later than we’d said we would.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Just six weeks to wait; then we’ll go out, we’ll go for walks together again, we’ll think and feel together; together we will keep silence, too, between long, long private discussions; for then we will tell each other what letters cannot say. Will we have any moments of peaceable, trusting joy, Michel? I almost feel I am no longer capable of this without you, but will I be so with you? [. . .] Your friend who will never abandon you and who forbids you to think of such a thing.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“In spite of ups and downs, the union between Jacques and Marguerite remained essential and indestructible. Nothing could undermine it over the forty-eight years of their life together. According to Avital Ronell, ‘Marguerite never considered anyone to be a rival. She always had something nice to say about the women who were close or too close to Jacques, which does not mean that she did not suffer because of them.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“But, in November, the problem of Nanterre raised its head again, now more urgently. One Saturday morning, after an hour’s journey under a heavy downpour, Ricoeur found only one student waiting for him in the room where he was to give his agrégation class. He was furious, and went straight up to the office to ask to take early retirement.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography