How to read the Derridas: Indexing moi et moi, Der und Der, me and me, this one and that one

I would like to spare you the tedium, the waste of time [Je voudrais vous épargner l'ennui, la perte de temps], and the subservience that always accompany the classical pedagogical procedures of forging links, referring back to prior premises or arguments, justifying one's own trajectory Il'auto- justification d'un trajetl, method, system, and more or less skillful transitions, reestablishing continuity, and so on. These are but some of the imperatives of classical pedagogy with which, to be sure, one can never break once and for all. Yet, if you were to submit to them rigorously, they would very soon reduce you to silence, tautology, and tiresome repetition. (Derrida 1985, 3—4; italicized French from French edition: Derrida 1984, 37) This is the way Derrida's Otobiographies begins. It was the second of the two seminars Derrida gave in French at the University of Virginia in 1976. These opening sentences somewhat defiantly put what Derrida is about to say under the aegis of what a moment later he calls 'academic freedom—I repeat: a-ca-dem-ic free-dom—you can take it or leave it' (Derrida 1985, 4). His opening is a somewhat violent and cheeky assault on the usual conventions of pedagogy. It tells the reader, as does the subtitle, 'The Teaching of Nietzsche ' , that his lecture is going to have, self-reflexively, something to do with teaching styles or methods.