Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El-Biar (a suburb of Algiers), Algeria (then a part of France), into a Sephardic Jewish family. Because Derrida’s writing concerns auto-bio-graphy (writing about one’s life as a form of relation to oneself), many of his writings are auto-biographical. So, for instance in Monolingualism of the Other (1998), Derrida recounts how, when he was in the “lycée” (high school), the Vichy regime in France proclaimed certain interdictions concerning the native languages of Algeria, in particular Berber. Derrida calls his experience of the “interdiction” “unforgettable and generalizable” (1998, p. 37). In fact, the “Jewish laws” passed by the Vichy regime interrupted his high school studies.