Marguerite Derrida, French psychoanalyst and translator, dies from coronavirus at 87

Marguerite Derrida, a prominent French psychoanalyst and translator of important works in the field, died on March 21 in Paris. She was 87.

Derrida’s son Pierre Alferi said the cause was the new coronavirus.

Derrida, who was the wife of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, trained at the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris and worked as a clinician, but she was also known for translations into French, including that of books by Melanie Klein, the Austrian-British psychoanalyst who specialized in children.

The Institute of Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis, which is based near Paris and publishes essays and organizes seminars in the field, said last month in its newsletter that with Derrida’s death, “a whole world is leaving.”

Marguerite Aucouturier was born on July 7, 1932, in Prague, the daughter of Gustave Aucouturier, a French journalist who worked in Moscow and Belgrade, and Marie Alferi, who was Czech.

Her father and her brother were enthusiasts and translators of Russian literature. Derrida herself studied Russian in her youth, and some of the works she later translated were by Russian authors like Vladimir Propp, a scholar who studied the structure of Russian folk tales.

She met Jacques Derrida in 1953 through her brother, who at the time was studying with him at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The couple married in 1957 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Jacques Derrida was studying at Harvard University.

They moved to the Paris suburb of Ris-Orangis in the late 1960s, when Jacques Derrida started finding success as the author of books on philosophy. He would go on to become the father of deconstruction, a theory about the contradictions and confusions of textual language and method of inquiry that gained a wide international following in the 1970s and 1980s.

Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Along with Alfieri, a novelist and poet, Derrida is survived by another son, Jean Derrida, an anthropologist and philosopher.

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