Quotes from Benoît Peeters

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.

The following day, Sylviane Agacinski commented on this declaration in her journal, which was published a few months later: I read in Libération that Jacques Derrida did not vote in the first round as he was 'in a bad mood with all the candidates'. So it's a question of mood, yet again!

We did a little yoga together. Sometimes he let me give him a massage. But when I mentioned meditation to him, he said that the only meditations he knew were those of Descartes and Husserl.

Your favourite quality in a woman?: Thought. Your favourite virtue?: Faithfulness.

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.

Derrida had an irresistible desire to seduce. And if he almost never spoke of his relationship to women, this was because his obsession with secrecy was greater in this area than in any other. But many people knew that 'the feminine' was, for him, always in the plural. If Derrida vaunted faithfulness in his reply to the Proust questionnaire, this was because every relationship was for him a unique, irreplaceable event; so he felt capable of faithfulness to many people.

As Marguerite Derrida puts it: 'I've always thought that it was mainly through his capacity for listening that Jacques could seduce women.

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.

Ultimately, the only thing that sometimes annoyed Marguerite was Jacques's jealous temperament. 'He wasn't happy when he couldn't reach me straightaway.

Perhaps there were two areas he didn't go into: clothes, and his relationship with women.

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.

During the 1980s, he went jogging, something he had picked up during his stays in California, but when he found that the pleasure promised was a little slow in coming, he eventually stopped.

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.

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.

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.*

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

Between Derrida and women (who had been so often ignored by the Western philosophical tradition), an alliance was soon to be formed. A personal factor probably played a part in this process.

Next to a corpus of which the critic 'has not retained intact a single fragment',5 he reintroduces the body, including his own penis.

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.

at the Catholic DePaul University, Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault were faithful translators as well as friends.

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.

One might even say that he had the last word. Derrida had criticized him for being too Christian. And Nancy replied to Derrida that he was too rabbinic.

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.

Marked as it was by the Zeitgeist, Glas can also be read as a reply to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, which had so irritated Derrida.