Reading about Algeria more or less clears Derrida's linguistic fog.
Derrida spent his childhood and adolescence there. The Vichy government, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II, did not permit Jewish children to study in the French school. The young Jewish Derrida got expelled from high school in 1942. In 1949, he left Algeria for France.
Algeria had no ‘center’. Morrissey argues, in his “’Nostalgeria’ and ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’”, Derrida’s ‘center’ can be understood as a response to the colonial state of Algeria, subject to the overseas France. The Algerian Communist Party might seem to be so, yet it was inevitably dependent on the French Communist Party in Paris. The Algerian Communist Party should be anti-colonial and an advocate for Algerian independence, yet it ended up a French puppet. Now, we may know more why Derrida points out the center is within and without the structure. When we put the idea into the Algerian political context, Derrida is more understandable.
The head-wrenching comprehensiveness of Derrida’s ideas reveals Derrida’s trauma. The expulsion from school, the stripped-off French nationality, and the Algerian political situation, form a web of references, though Derrida tried hard to avoid politics, as Derrida developed his philosophy. Morrissey accounts the ‘elasticity of [Derrida]’s terms’, that is, the absence of clear definitions of the terms which needs the reader to interpret, for Derrida’s fear of expulsion. Derrida’s speaking clear French means a Jew’s ambition to claim Frenchness. It got Derrida expelled from school already as he tried to be French. Derrida wrote ambiguously since he had to say what he wanted and had long suppressed.
Morrissey suggests that now one can see why Derrida said, ‘one has to go through the experience of decontruction’. Derrida had gone through it personally before introducing the world his ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’.
Louis. 4th April 2026.