Jacques Derrida, asked to narrate something of his life in an interview:

I wish that a narration were possible. For the moment it is not possible. I dream of managing one day not to recount this legacy, this past experience, this history, but at least to give a narration of it among other possible narrations. But in order to get there, I would have to undertake a kind of work, I would have to set out on an adventure that up till now I have not been capable of. To invent, to invent a language, to invent modes of anamnesis … For me, it is this adventure that interests me the most in a certain way, but which still today seems practically inaccessible.

So having said that, am I going to take the risk here, while improvising, of telling you things that would resemble a narration? No! … I don’t feel capable of giving myself over to … variations on my memory, my inheritance. All the more so in that this inheritance – if it is one – is multiple, not very homogeneous, full of all kinds of grafts.

… I see the journey of my brief existence as a journey in view of determining and naming the place from which I will have had the experience of exteriority. And the anamnesis we were talking about at the outset, this anamnesis would be in view of identifying, of naming it – not effacing the exteriority, I don’t think it can be effacted – but of naming it, identifying it, and thinking it a little better.

… a récit is not simply a memory reconstituting a past; a récit is also a promise, it is also something that makes a commitment toward the future. What I dream of is not only the narration of a past that is inaccessible to me, but a narration that would also be a future, that would determine a future.