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Books

An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon

Omar Sabbagh on a biography of Jacques Derrida.

Deciding to write a biog raphy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), even a predominantly intellectual biography like Peter Salmon’s, must, perhaps, involve a dilemma. As Salmon himself suggests in his Introduction, the temptation to mimic Derrida’s own ‘gnomic, allusive, elusive’ manner of writing can be overwhelming. Yet while saying that Salmon has written a superb intellectual biography that does a terrific job of humanizing a man and thinker often seen or imagined as arcanely inaccessible, we can also mention the more approachable way in which Salmon mirrors for his readers’ benefit some of the gnomic tics of his subject (or is it object?). If there really is, as Derrida says, ‘nothing outside the text’ – meaning that all meaning is text-based, and so susceptible to plural interpretations – then writing a biography in a predominantly plain-spoken manner might seem to be conceptually problematic, no? The book, however, hardly ever fails to intrigue, picking out and deploying moments of Derrida’s life and work, text and context, with a novelistic rhythm.

As the chapters of this book move chronologically through Derrida’s work and life, they make use of epigraphs he employed in his oeuvre, indicating how layered all writing is, including biography.

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