Among nearly 25,000 pages of seminar notes, one must expect a few idiosyncrasies. This digital repository is peppered with the material traces of real-life pedagogical and philosophical practice. One finds stray matter, errant postcards, doodles, scraps of drafts of other works, hotel stationery, restaurant menus, and the occasional label from a bottle of Cognac.

This page collects a few notable oddities that made their way into archive and highlights those that may be most interesting to students and researchers.

Hidden Texts in “Théorie et pratique”

The typescript of Derrida's 1976-1977 seminar “Théorie et pratique” bears fascinating marks of Derrida’s reuse of scrap paper in his teaching notes.

For example, about 100 pages into the seminar, we find scraps of Derrida’s text “Fors, Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok.” In playful reference to Mallarmé's etymological fantasies in “Les mots anglais,” Derrida presents the psychoanalytical inquiries of Abraham and Torok in a preface to their work “Le Verbier de l'homme au loups” (1976). Abraham and Torok delve into the psychic “crypts” produced in failed mournings and invite readers to listen to the ghosts that clang in seemingly non-sensical phonemes. The suggestion of an “anti-semantics” in Abraham and Torok’s discoveries leads Derrida to reflect on the limits of the symbolic analysis of the real or imaginary incorporations of those phantoms who take their secrets to the grave of another's psyche.

Parts of these texts have thus been encrypted on the versos of this seminar, as displayed below.

Image source: "Théorie et pratique" seminar (msc001_ b13_ f03_ 0101 and msc001_ b13_ f03_ 0102). The image on the left (recto) shows notes from "Théorie et pratique," while the image on the right (verso) shows a page from "Fors."

Another hundred pages later, the seminar notes appear typed on the backs of ripped quarto sheets from a German translation of “Éperons: Styles de Nietzche.” In 1976, the publishers Flammarion (Paris) and Corbo e Fiore (Venice) published a quadrilingual edition of this text (German, French, Italian, English) in quarto with an introduction by Stephano Agouti.

For reasons we can only imagine, Derrida reused torn half sheets of this document to type out the sixth session of this seminar, as seen below.

Image source: "Théorie et pratique" seminar (msc001_ b13_ f04_ 0070 and msc001_ b13_ f04_ 0071). The image on the left (recto) shows notes from "Théorie et pratique," while the image on the right (verso) shows a ripped page from a German translation of “Éperons: Styles de Nietzche."

Having only highlighted two examples here, there remains an exciting amount of work to be done in discovering the stray matter within Derrida's teaching materials. Below we have highlighted a few collected discoveries that reminded us of the person behind this digital archive.

Image Sources (from bottom left clockwise): human silhouette (msc001_ b04_ f06_ 0014), habit polygon (msc001_ b11_ f04_ 0016), dancing flower (msc001_ b04_ f04_ 0023), vegetal scene (msc001_ b04_ f08_ 0025), times (msc001_ b13_ f05_ 0044).

Image sources: Chantilly (msc001_ b04_ f11_ 0039), Cordon Rouge (msc001_ b04_ f11_ 0056), Cognac Hennessy (msc001_ b04_ f11_ 0054), Kirsch Cigogne (msc001_ b05_ f06_ 0015), wine label with writing (msc001_ b07_ f11_ 0032), menu with writing (msc001_ b07_ f11_ 0047).

Image sources: calendar pages (msc001_ b04_ f08_ 0002), postcard of a cow (msc001_ b117_ f04_ 0145), frequently used stationery (see for example "Le suicide," msc001_ b04_ f15_ 0028).

Image sources: Comité de lutte du CES Jean Lurcat (msc001_ b13_ f11_ 0117), Le droit à la philosophie pour tous (msc001_ b12_ f09_ 0066), Association Jan Hus (msc001_ b17_ f04_ 0024).