All the "French" theory that is so widely used in today's humanities was influenced by the events in Algeria. In many cases, from Albert Camus to Hélène Cixous and, perhaps above all, Jacques Derrida, these intellectuals were Algerian themselves. In others, from Louis Althusser to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, their training had involved a period of teaching in North Africa.

Derrida later described the experience of growing up in Algeria, where he was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in 1930. In the height of his fame, he called his relation to his home "nostalgeria (nostalgérie)," evoking place, memory, loss and desire.

In a writer so careful to displace the one-to-one causality, perhaps we might nonetheless venture the idea that this very displacement was metonymic of his historical experience: first "French," then in 1943 classified "Jewish" by Vichy and expelled from high school, then "French-Algerian" and his later insistence on the cosmopolitan.

His colleague Jean-Luc Nancy has drawn attention to the "coincidence which is also more than the coincidence that it was," namely that it was in 1962, the year of Algerian independence, that Derrida published his ground-breaking first book, a study of the philosopher Husserl entitled The Origin of Geometry. It announced what Nancy calls

the independence of Derrida's thought.

For Derrida, however, there is an impossibility of an identification with the identifying subject.
In his landmark lecture at the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966 on structuralism, Derrida distanced himself from the "new" methodology in these lapidary words:

the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.

Four years after Algerian independence, Derrida displaced the entire history of the West, no less, into this alternance of centre and centre via a series of "ruptures." Did the "rupture" of "Algeria" with "France" perhaps stand as the instance in which the place of what he would call "white metaphor" became apparent to him?

Certainly one can contrast the 1958 statement by Jean-François Lyotard, who was intensely involved in the anti-war effort: "there is already no longer an Algérie française, in that 'France' is no longer present in any form in Algeria"

And there was Frantz Fanon.

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