‘I have only one language, and it is not mine’, says Jacques Derrida in The Monolingualism of the Other, in a formula that has become famous. Meaning at least two things by this: (1) something specific to Derrida himself, as a singular case or example, and (2) something general about the relation anyone at all might have to the language or languages they speak. Derrida speaks French, speaks only French (I will perhaps return in discussion to his real competence in English or more exactly American), but he speaks it from an eccentric place, as it were, a place of foreignness that we can quickly label the place of the ‘franco-maghrebian’ and more precisely the ‘Algerian Jew’. The French that Derrida speaks, a French that aims to be very correct, very pure, that has the ambition of being a French with no accent, is nevertheless not ‘his’ language, in the sense that it is the language of the other, of the metropole, of the colonial power, a language imposed more or less violently on little Jackie Derrida who might, indeed normally speaking should (or so one might think) rather speak another language, for example Arabic.

This singular situation, the singularity of which Derrida has fun emphasising (by contrasting his position ‘in’ the language with that of his friend Khatibi), is also exemplary, in the sense that its singularity supposedly reveals a more general truth. Following a logic of the example that has always fascinated Derrida, there is a paradoxical relation between on the one hand the example that is truly exemplary (the very example, and so the best example, a priceless example outside the series, possibly the only true example, and so somewhere an example without example), and on the other the example which is only an example, a sample among others, where any example, any old example is as good as any other and stands for any other.