Derrida's Biography (Derrida, Who?)

I. Who or What Other in Me Signs the Work

Proust's evaluation of the "method" of the nineteenth-century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, which consisted in not separating an artist's life from the assessment of his works, ends with the following judgment: "[T]his method fails to recognize what any more than merely superficial acquaintance with ourselves teaches us: that a book is the product of another I than the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices."¹ According to Proust, interviewing those who used to know a writer, as Sainte-Beuve did, will tell us nothing of "the veritable I" of that writer.² This method, Proust continues, and even the privilege of knowing a writer personally, as Sainte-Beuve did Stendhal, bring no insight into his writings—indeed, Sainte-Beuve asserted that Stendhal's novels were "frankly detestable."³ Whereas Sainte-Beuve conceived of a continuity between an author's life, his background, and his oeuvre, in which one would be illuminated by the other, Proust pointed out a division within the I between the author and the man in the world. According to Proust, the veritable I is understood or recreated in art or fiction; fiction shows the truth of the I ("The I of the writer is only shown in his books"), whereas the I in the world is at a remove, exterior to the real I, even when engaged in conversations with other writers, until it abstracts others and the I that knows others in working solitude.⁴ To some extent, then, Proust does not deny a relation between the author and the work, but he argues that if one wants to acquire "the intelligence of the works," one should ask nothing, above all one should not depend on the "biography" of the writer.⁵ Furthermore, the author's life on which Sainte-Beuve depends, that of the inessential I in the world, ends up being "sacrificed" to the veritable I,⁶ perhaps as a form of death of the author, where the relation of the biological to writing has to be rethought. Proust might be understood to be saying that the I is either dead or fictitious through and through.

While Proust may seem too assured of being able to identify with certainty the location of the division between the I and the work, the point at which one can name the absolute exteriority of the biography to the work, he does point to a question that Jacques Derrida has addressed in several essays, that of the signature, and the question of who or what other in me signs the work. As Derrida writes in "I Have a Taste for the Secret,"

[F]or me the great question is always the question who. Call it biographical, autobiographical or existential, the form of the question who is what matters to me…. Who? Who asks the question who? … It is clear that the who withdraws from or provokes the displacement of the categories in which biography, autobiography, and memoirs are thought.⁷

On several occasions, Derrida returns to the question of the biographies and autobiographies of philosophers, including in a documentary about himself, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, and titled Derrida.⁸ Is this documentary an attempt at Derrida's biography? It displays at least scenes from Derrida's professional and private life, and extracts, without indicating the source information found in quasi-autobiographical writings by Derrida, such as "Circumfession," what Gil Kofman, who transcribed the documentary into a screenplay for publication, calls "ostensibly biographical facts," or what Derrida calls in the film "raw facts."⁹ At any rate, the title encourages a confusion between two proper names, that of the film and that of a certain "who" on which the film focuses. The film displays the possibility of biography and autobiography in its relation to the oeuvre, or, in a sense, (auto)biography itself is the subject of this film. As such, it addresses Derrida, the "who" staged by the film, but Derrida also points out that the documentary will constitute the director...