Algerische Ouvertüren. Pierre Nora und Jacques Derrida im Widerstreit

Abstract

Abstract By way of a historical narrative, the article focuses on the background of biographical experience - familial and existential, cultural and political (in terms of the respective historical upheavals) - so as to scrutinize the emergence of the scholarly paradigms connected with the historian Pierre Nora and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Proceeding fromthe set of problems pertaining to Algeria - which affected either of them, albeit differently - the epistemologically significant interrelation between “body and corpus” (Derrida) will be reflected upon. The historically dissimilar modes of a Jewish acculturation and accommodation to French modernity are crucial to both Nora’s and Derrida’s experience - Ashkenazic in the former, Sephardic-Maghrebian in the latter. The Algerian experience lays the foundation for their respective conceptions of knowledge and interpretation: in Nora’s case, the continental preconditions for his historical concept of “lieu dememoire”; in Derrida’s, the colonial origins of deconstruction in terms of its conceptualization.