The Biography Regime Martin McQuillan

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge, Polity, 2012), 603 pp; Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York, Liveright, 2014), 534 pp. Who could survive their own biography? How many of us could bear to have all the contradictions and complexities of our lived experience recounted as a seamless narrative for the benefit of a reading audience? And for those who are published authors, whose work could endure an attempt to explain, justify or criticise that work in relation to a partial retelling of their lives? The genre of biographical writing is both seductive and fraught with danger. It remains central to the cult of the author that Barthes diagnosed over fifty years ago, occupying the most canonical and economically productive sites of our literary culture. A quick look at a recent (July 13 2014) New York Times bestsellers list shows that seven out of the top ten are biographies, autobiographies or memoirs. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the question of self-exculpation and the anteriorly scribed biography. No doubt such a distinction will not bear deconstruction but let’s progress on this provisional basis for the moment. The popularity of biography as a genre both feeds a specular, modern culture of celebrity and seems to be a powerful residual effect of belief in the efficacy of a certain materialism, by which ‘the text’ is explicable in terms of events. This faith in biography has deep roots in the reading public, and it would not be in any way excessive to identify it as a persistent, inertial effect of logocentrism itself, whereby language operates to convince that it can be explained only by factors seemingly extraneous to itself. The task of the biographer, then, is both determined in advance by the expectations The Oxford Literary Review 37.1 (2015): 141–152 DOI: 10.3366/olr.2015.0154 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/journal/olr

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of an entire epochal, cultural configuration, and (for those willing to take it seriously) an adventure in the most challenging scholarship imaginable. How can a biographer ever do justice to his or her subject? Who would presume to take up this challenge in an unreflecting way or have the resources to see it through without doubt or self-inquiry? No doubt one can succumb to the aporias of biography in more or less knowing ways, or, even attempt to push the antimonies of the genre as a condition of an ever-greater understanding of both writing and its object. However, which reader would thank a biographer for such cleverness? The genre of biography is that of the neutre. The successful biographer is the one who is a blank, a mere cipher of facts, or a ‘ghost writer’ as the phrase turns in entertainment journalism. Derrida begins his Memoirs: For Paul de Man with the seemingly self-effacing construct ‘I have never known how to tell a story’, and if we are to take this on face value much will depend upon the meaning of ‘known’ in this sentence. For up until now Derrida himself has largely told the story of deconstruction. ‘Telling’ in this sense involves not only explicit, if overdetermined, biographical vignettes by Derrida (think of not only ‘Circumfession’ and ‘Envois’ but also interventions such as Chaque fois unique la fin du monde, or Memoirs and its epilogue ‘Le Parjure’) but also modes of writerly and institutional control that have set the narrative for deconstruction such as Le Toucher or HC: pour la vie. The story of deconstruction has been ‘told’ hitherto by Derrida in the numerous interviews, press articles and two feature films (Safaa Fathy’s D’allieurs Derrida [1999] and Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick’s Derrida [2002]). The myths of Derrida and the stories of deconstruction were in fact carefully prepared by the man himself, from the choice of his circle to a knowing relation to the media during the mature part of his academic and public life. This is not so surprising for one who wrote so much about both autobiography and legacy. However, ‘Derrida’s Derrida’ is surely something of a trap for the biographer. Telling the story aright does not necessarily mean telling the story the way the subject would have wanted it to be told. To be seduced by the narcissism of one’s subject is the greatest danger for a biographer. The biographer must be a creature of the archive who labours to retrieve the unknown, welcome or otherwise.

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Equally, a biographer who came from within Derrida’s circle and who has ‘permission’ to take on the challenge of biography through access to family papers and interviews granted out of friendship must tread a careful line between hospitality and criticality, if not for the sake of the dead then out of respect for the living. This is the space occupied by Benoît Peeters’s Derrida: A Biography. It is an impossible undertaking that he pulls off with great skill in a compelling and moving narrative that demonstrates an impressive effort of scholarship. However, at times it can be accused of being too close to a certain memory of Derrida and bordering on the overly protective. But who could spend as many years in archives as Peeters has without being devoted to his subject? His biography of Derrida is by no means a hagiography but it is a love letter of sorts, an articulation of the biographer’s admiration for the man he invests so much time in. As Derrida tells Kofman and Dick, their film will be as much their biography as his. In this sense, Peeters’s book is the sort of biography that one intimate with Derrida and his friends, particularly with the French scene, would write. We might call it the first iteration of a biography, like Ernest Jones’s three-volume study of Freud, which is also at times given to proximity with its object’s own autobiographical constructions. Peeters’s biography stands head and shoulders above all other previous efforts such as Jason Powell’s rushed-to-print doctoral thesis Jacques Derrida: A biography (2006), David Mikics’ ill-conceived and inaccurate, Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography (2010), and Edward Baring’s under-cooked The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (2013). In contrast, Peeters’ book is a biography ‘worthy of the name’, as Derrida would have put it. It is divided into three sections: ‘Jackie 1930–1962’ (covering Derrida’s childhood in Algeria, adolescence at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, his years of study at the École Normale Supérieure, his time at Harvard, and his suffocating return to Algeria), ‘Derrida 1963–1983’ (treating his development as a philosopher and person from his thesis on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry to his arrest in Prague and the death of Paul de Man) and ‘Jacques Derrida 1984–2004’ (dealing with his most public years as an international figure, from the Collège International de Philosophie and his move from Yale to UC Irvine, to

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his later punishing schedule across several continents until his untimely death). As with any biography, philosophical or otherwise, there is a poignancy in the recovery of the early years that is lacking in the documentation of the public life: in literary terms, becoming is always more interesting than being. The opening chapters on Algeria and the Derrida family are beautifully drawn, capturing the very ordinary nature of Derrida’s extraordinary journey. It is in the detail and loving reconstruction of mostly unknown material that Peeters distinguishes himself as a biographer. The later accounts of the asphyxiating vanities of the Parisian intellectual scene and the relentless programme of public appearances are never quite as compelling as the story of Derrida’s youthful estrangement, hypochondria and melancholy. The former may be what makes Derrida a suitable subject for biography, but it is the latter that makes this biography necessary reading. Derrida may not have known how to tell a story but his life was nothing if not novelistic. There is enough minutiae in here to satisfy the most ardent Derrida anorak: the one and only time Derrida saw Merleau-Ponty was when he went to observe the oral exams in philosophy as student in hypokhâgne; Derrida corresponded with Levinas following the outbreak of the Six-Day War in Israel-Palestine in June 1967; the official who arrested Derrida in Prague on fabricated drugs charges was himself later arrested for drug trafficking; the false name used on the flat to protect Althusser’s privacy after his release from the Soisy clinic, was ‘Berger’ (coincidentally Hélène Cixous’s married name); Derrida was the honorary president of the ‘Comité Radicalement Anti-Corrida’, dedicated to a ban on bullfighting. However, despite its length there is much that is missing here as well, for example, what of Derrida’s concerted efforts to lose his accent in order to blend in at the ENS? He speaks openly of it in Monolingualism of the Other, ‘a strong southern accent — seems incompatible to me with the dignity of public speech. (Inadmissible, isn’t it? Well, I admit it)’. Perhaps, for Peeters this is not an issue worthy of comment (which probably tells us much about the biographer) but it is not an inconsiderable decision for Derrida to make or subsequent attitude to adopt. However, the biggest elephant in the room is the question of sex. In the 2002 film Kofman asks Derrida what he would most like to see in a film about Kant, Hegel or Heidegger. Derrida takes his time before answering, then responds ‘their sex lives’. Derrida explains

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that these philosophers never speak about their own sex lives in their writing. They present themselves in their philosophy as asexual but what could be more important to them and to their writing than love, those they love, and love-making? It is not as if Derrida was a hermit and Peeters has no material to work with; rather there seems to have been a conscious decision that it is altogether too soon to address this topic in a biography. For the genre of biography the sex life of the subject is, traditionally, not at all marginal. Rather, it is surely a decisive index of the subject’s psychic experience. However, in Peeters’s book the topic is marginal and its occlusion begins to put pressure on the entire biographical project. There is one relationship that Peeters cannot circumvent, but he treads wearily while being compelled to break the fourth wall of his narrative: The borders between public and private life are one of the most delicate questions which a biographer encounters. And the long love affair between Derrida and Sylviane Agacinski that started in 1972 is one of the major difficulties the present biographer has had to face. Agacinski was not willing to present her own account, and the immense correspondence that she exchanged with Derrida will apparently be inaccessible for a long time. (244)

Peeters does go on to treat the relationship with Agacinski in detail. It has also been discussed in part in two biographers of Agacinski’s husband, Lionel Jospin, whom she married after her time with Derrida. I am less concerned by the absence of revelations concerning the Agacinski affair, as Peeters explains he is playing a difficult hand and we have the ‘Envois’ for those who have ears to read even if it is not reducible to a roman à clef. There are details to chew here including a heartbreaking episode of Derrida and his son by Agacinski, Daniel, unbeknownst to each other sharing a flight to the south of France together. Rather, I am concerned by the idea that the biographer stands tremulously on the borders of the public and private with certain topics just too private to address. Surely, the inextricable implication of the private with the public is the very point of biography. Having committed to the task, one that should be done without fear or favour, it might be considered problematic for the biographer to have a dose of scruples at certain thresholds, even the bedroom door. For good or

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ill, the frontier between the private and the public is the very space of biography, and it is a distinction that would not hold much water when subjected to deconstruction. There is plenty of airing of the private Derrida in the biography: the chapters on Jacques and Marguerite’s early married life on an army base in Koléa, Algeria, and in depressive Le Mans, are among some of Peeters’s most empathetic and moving chapters. However, he remains reticent about discussing the character trait that must have occupied much of Derrida’s adult life. He notes Derrida’s ‘reputation of being a seducer’ on only two occasions (246 and 421) prior to quoting an interview with Avital Ronell: ‘He was a male, a white, a seducer, a philosopher: all potential flaws that might lead him [to] being seen as on the side of traditional power. He was starting to become the victim of his own categories, his own war on phallogocentrism’ (486). The relationship with Agacinski is well known and undoubtedly central to Derrida’s writing, but the quotidian lovers do not merit a mention. I do not expect a roll call but given the difficulties most of us have surviving one relationship, it might be apposite for a biographer of Derrida to examine the motivation behind the desire for such repeated affirmation and pleasure-seeking. Peeters ducks behind Derrida’s own defence: ‘Derrida had an irresistible desire to seduce women. And if he almost never spoke of his relationship to women, this was because his obsession with secrecy was greater in this area than any other’ (421). Apropos of a relationship, Peeters quotes the final line of a notebook by Derrida from January 1977: ‘you should never say anything about a secret’ (293). He goes on, in a later chapter, to cite Derrida at length in another context: I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse or fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. [. . . ] if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. (511)

Peeters chooses to draw a veil across the entrance of the boudoir, as Louis Calvet coyly does in his biography of Barthes: ‘Barthes had love affairs, like everyone else, but if he did not want them to

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become public knowledge, and if, after his death, his lovers choose not to discuss them, then there is no reason why I should deliver up their names to the public’. It is fine, I think, for Derrida and Barthes to assert their own right to the secret (‘A gentleman has no memory’, as the Chilean footballer Mauricio Pinilla said when asked if he was sleeping with a team-mate’s wife), especially when so much is openly legible in their own writing: both were considerable autobio-graphers. However, it is another thing for a biographer to keep secrets by showing restraint at certain frontiers and not others. This is to misunderstand what Derrida means by a ‘secret’ tout court. The fact is not the secret; it is the understanding of the fact that remains irreducibly complex. Such ‘secrecy’ is a condition of democracy because it is an acknowledgement of a profound undecidability that lies at the heart of decision-making, ruining every dream of totalitarianism. Democracy is equally defined by the right of, to go too quickly, ‘a free media’ to uncover what someone else would like to keep hidden. The genre of biography is undoubtedly part of that mediatic space. In its enlightenment incarnation it is coterminous with the democratization of the public space and the emergence of the modern subject. The constant erasure and reinscription of the frontier between the public and the private is the predicate of democracy itself, of our public institutions, and the modern nation-state. Accordingly, the task of the biographer is unbearably oppressive because it is a commitment to a form of transparency that is altogether tyrannical. Biography, as it were, is a totalitarian space. Only the subject has the right to attempt an escape, the biographer is its prisoner. This is not to wish to favour an ideology of transparency over a theoretical concept of the unknowable; rather it is to identify the aporia upon whose horns the biographical enterprise is hoisted. I do not raise the question of sex in Derrida: A biography in order to be a spoilsport, to be seen to criticize an otherwise laudable work of scholarship, or, for moralizing and condemnatory reasons, to pass judgment on Derrida’s life. Rather, I worry that a decorum on the part of others that borders on protection runs the risk of ultimately being misunderstood by history. The sex life of Jacques Derrida is not a mystery, in any sense of that word, but it is curious that his biography treats it with such reverence. If deconstruction’s relation to the media teaches us one thing it is that silence is different from a secret, in the Derridean sense, and that belated exposé is far more damaging to a reputation

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than honest avowal of the facts. Where there is only silence there is always over-interpretation. We think no less of Foucault’s work for our knowledge of the multiple lives documented by David Macey, any more than we do of Lacan’s seminars for the scenes depicted by Elizabeth Roudinescou. More recently, Francoise Dosse’s Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives is forensic without being hostile. By the end of Derrida: A biography, I am at once gratified by the effort to present the life of the most important philosopher since Heidegger in a full, serious and rigorous manner (it is an important book) and at the same time painfully aware that I may have been sold an enormous pup. The subject, Derrida, escapes the biographical effort. There is little attempt here to explain the work of Derrida and we are mercifully spared a ‘deconstructive biography’ of him. But more than this, the person of Jacques Derrida cannot finally be determined by this single attempt at a literary genre. To my ears, his laughter echoes at the close, as he has somehow managed another exit, one more sortie, sneaking under the fence of the totalitarian space. Slipping the net of biography, he leaves behind a record of traces largely of his own invention. This biography is not an exorcism, parapsychologists yet-to-come will still have scope for future inquiries. By contrast The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish is everything that the Peeters’s biography is not: unforgiving, judgmental, prurient and scandal-mongering. To the question: which biographer would devote years of their life in an archive without a love of their subject? the answer is Evelyn Barish. That is in fact to do Barish a disservice, for the subject that she is very much in love with is not Paul de Man but the exposure of the fraud Paul de Man. This task she takes on with gusto, exhibiting all the zeal of a mandated exorcist. However, as Derrida noted some time ago, the most expeditious way to raise a ghost is by attempting to disavow one. Barish’s biography has given rise to a renewed interest in de Man and his related affairs. I have written about the reanimation of this dead culture war elsewhere (Times Higher Education, 10 July 2014) and others such as Peter Brooks in The New York Review of Books and Susan Suleiman in The New York Times have pointed out the errors of fact and translation in Barish’s book that cast doubt on the reliability of her narration. Along with Louis Menand’s long run at the biography for The New Yorker, which attempted to do justice to both the complexity of de Man’s thought and Barish’s

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archival endeavor, the US west coast media have on this occasion been relatively sympathetic to de Man. Perhaps, they see in Barish’s more outré pronouncements a reflection of their former selves, when back in 1988 they were the ringleaders of the tormenters, for various reasons taking delight in placing de Man’s biography under the spotlight. Or perhaps, in the years since the de Man affair both the US public space and academic English studies have been dumbed-down enough to make the Belgian much less of a threat to people than he once was, allowing for certain corners of the press to be more sanguine. A perspective not shared by all, including one Emmett Tyrell Jr., editorin-chief of The American Spectator, who wrote in The Washington Times, a proudly right-wing newspaper, that deconstructionists ‘who are not out-and-out frauds are obviously mental defectives’ and that he would propose Barish for a Presidential Medal of Freedom ‘once we get a proper president’. And so the knock-about abuse continues, if it had ever stopped. There is much one could pick out of Barish’s breathless and salacious prose to hold up to inspection. However, allow me, in light of my comments above on the discretion of Benoît Peeters, to choose just one example. In his early years in the United States de Man was acquainted with the novelist Mary McCarthy, who in 1949 recommended him for his first teaching post at Bard College where she had taught from 1946 to 1947. Barish speculates at length about the nature of their relationship: Inevitably, the question arises as to whether de Man and McCarthy had an affair. Paul’s widow thought they did. Thinking over the several episodes he had recounted, Pat thought such a liaison quite likely. Paul told her, she reported, that McCarthy had ‘come onto him’ but that he had not accepted her advances — a proviso undoubtedly meant to forestall marital discord, she thought, for Pat and Paul were jealous of each other. She reasoned that McCarthy’s belated ‘dislike for him came after she was somewhat a woman scorned’. Given the other crucial information de Man concealed from his wife — including even the bigamous status of their own marriage — to allude to McCarthy in several small but personal anecdotes was, for him, exceptional. (279)

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Let me lay to one side the very open question as to whether Paul de Man did in fact mislead Patricia Kelley over his marital status (Patricia certainly knew of Anne Baraghian, who had visited Bard, after which de Man had taken practical steps to secure a divorce in Arkansas prior to marrying in June 1950) and what this might mean for any subsequent discussions about previous relationships between a husband and wife. The question here for the biographer is the difference between evidence and speculation. Mrs. de Man’s suspicions allow us to entertain the thought, but Barish goes further. The next few paragraphs of the biography see Barish ask a range of sources their opinion on the likelihood of a relationship between de Man and McCarthy. No one is able to confirm the suggestion, with those closest to McCarthy, like Elizabeth Hardwick, providing most grounds for doubt. Barish concludes: Whether he and Mary had an affair cannot be established with certainty. However, given the many facts of the history, habits, and social world of each person, there is no plausible reason why they should not have had one, and more than enough need on each side to bring it about. (281)

In other words, no one knows whether they had an affair but given the narrative of de Man’s devilry offered by Barish it suits her to say that they did. Barish goes as far as to suggest that McCarthy might have wanted to marry de Man herself: ‘This brilliant and goodlooking European, an athletic, sexually attractive but impoverished young immigrant, struggling far below his social and intellectual level, would have exactly fitted the profile of a person to whom [McCarthy] would want to give help’ (280). One can think of many terms to describe Paul de Man but ‘athletic’ and ‘sexually attractive’ would surely be quite low on the list. However, Barish’s speculative flight continues. In November 1949 Mary McCarthy fell down the stairs of her cottage in Portsmouth R.I and miscarried a pregnancy already in its second trimester. Barish writes: ‘No one in their circle has connected McCarthy’s miscarriage to her friendship with de Man, but if an affair took place, and she had reason to think him the father, that would go far to explain both her devotion to his interests and her subsequent ongoing bitterness’ (281).

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Benoît Peeters’ goes out of his way to record only events that can be evidenced by correspondence. Hence, the limits of his commentary on the Derrida-Agacinski affair, which we can at least be sure, actually happened. For Evelyn Barish it is a short logical hop from the fond reminiscence of de Man’s widow to proofless conjecture that an eminent novelist fell down the stairs miscarrying Paul de Man’s child. In her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark writes, ‘the disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that wellmeaning scholars tend to repeat each other. Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect. In my case, the truth is often less flattering, less romantic, but often more interesting than the false story’. Even the most totalitarian space is still predicated on an economy of debts, duties and responsibilities. This is especially true for the scholar-biographer, where the legitimacy of the latter designation depends upon the authority of the former. It is all a bit disappointing because in truth Barish’s biography is very readable, displaying a long-reaching scholarship that brings considerable new detail to the de Man party, even if it stops in 1960. One could happily pose with it in a Brooklyn coffee house and appear quite the sophisticate. However, Barish cannot rein in her desire for scandal and exposure. In the end the book tells us more about the motivations behind the de Man affair than it does about de Man’s affairs. The most disappointing aspect of the biography is the constant appeal to the authority of the late Patricia de Man, who gave interviews to Barish on the understanding that the biographer intended to set the record straight. I cannot imagine that this book is quite what Mrs. de Man had in mind. If the idea of the post-enlightenment subject depends upon the rise of the genre of biography, and biography as a genre relies upon reporting that does not stop at the public/private frontier including and especially human sexuality, then what remains of the secret in such a totalitarian regime? After over 1,000 pages of Derrida and de Man biography, we are left with their work. Their writing remains untouched by these biographical endeavours. Peeters seldom attempts an explanation of Derrida’s philosophy, Barish admits that an account of de Man’s mature work is beyond her capabilities, even though she cannot help herself on occasion: ‘he thrived on uncertainty in his life, as he later did in his linguistic philosophy’ (301–2).

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The whole of de Man and Derrida remains to be read with the relation between the thinkers’ lives and their work remaining as elusive and inconclusive as ever. The answer to the question of how to read Derrida or de Man after Barish and Peeters does not, I think, lie in dismissing the biographical enterprise. Rather, it may be possible to escape the oppressive order of the epochal regime of biography by reading with and against biographical, autobiographical and fictional texts, multiplying and heightening alliances and connections across the hypertext of a body of work that is, after all, always already in deconstruction. To quote Peeters’s interview with Roger Laporte, the essential thing in biography is to ‘reverse the relation, established since the beginning, between living and writing’: ‘Whereas ordinary life precedes the way we narrate it, I have wagered that a certain life is neither anterior nor exterior to writing [. . . ] one cannot narrate a story that has not yet taken place, a completely original [inouïe] life to which only writing would grant access’ (162). The bet to take here is that the lives of de Man and Derrida lie in front of us as part of such future acts of reading and writing, of which, say, Hélène Cixous’ Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif would be a good example. What falls out from such a commitment is complication, and both life and philosophy are nothing if not complicated.