Derrida, Jacques - Thinking What Comes 1

The Frontiers of Theory
Thinking
What Comes
Volume 1
Essays, Interviews,
and Interventions
Jacques Derrida
Edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghaﬁ
Thinking What Comes, Volume 1
The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
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Poetry in Painting: Writings on
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Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Man
Joana Masó Andrzej Warminski
The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter- Without Mastery: Reading and Other
Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Forces
Blanchot and the later Gadamer Sarah Wood
Timothy Clark Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy,
About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Politics, Psychoanalysis
Philosophy of Time Simon Morgan Wortham
Mark Currie Mother Homer is Dead
The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality Hélène Cixous and Peggy Kamuf
and the Philosophy of Surprise Essays, Interviews, and Interventions:
Mark Currie Thinking What Comes, Volume 1
The Post-Romantic Predicament Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions:
The Paul de Man Notebooks Thinking What Comes, Volume 2
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
Forthcoming Titles:
Readings of Derrida
Sarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll
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Thinking What Comes,
Volume 1
Essays, Interviews, and Interventions
Jacques Derrida
Edited by
Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii

Editors’ Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xiii
PART I What Comes

1. Thinking What Comes (2007) 3
Translated by Kas Saghafi and Chris Lucibella
2. Substitutions (2001) 31
Translated by Bradley Ramos
3. Idioms, Nationalities, Deconstructions: Encounter with
Jacques Derrida in Rabat (1998) 51
Translated by Adam Rosenthal
4. Message from Jacques Derrida (2002) 94
Translated by Caleb Salgado
5. The Future Anterior of the Archive (2002) 101
Translated by Jacob Levi
6. Derrida, Mandela, Politics, and the Market (2000) 108
PART II Interviews
7. Jacques Derrida, Thinker of the Event (2004) 119
Translated by Philippe Lynes
8. “If I can say more than one sentence” (2004) 127
Translated by David Wills
9. Conversation about the Collège International de
Philosophie (1998) 147
Translated by David Maruzzella
vi Contents
10. Hospitality ad infinitum (1999) 158

Translated by Jacob Levi
PART III Europe

11. Thinking Europe at Its Frontiers (1993) 185
12. Double Memory; “Old Europe” and Our Europe (2008) 195
Index 206
Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception, Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends,
and afterlife. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory, but a significant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of
auto-critique need to consider: What is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of
a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
“Theory” is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the
transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of
thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or
precedent: as a “name,” a word, and a concept, Theory arrests or
misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to
dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary, one must always insist
on the it-is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theo-
ries of all kinds). Rather, this series is concerned with the presentation
of work which challenges complacency and continues the transforma-
tive work of critical thinking. It seeks to offer the very best of contem-
porary theoretical practice in the humanities, work which continues to
push ever further the frontiers of what is accepted, including the name
of Theory. In particular, it is interested in that work which involves the
necessary endeavor of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving
the specificity of disciplines. Published by Edinburgh University Press,
in the city of Enlightenment, this series promotes a certain closeness
viii Series Editor’s Preface
to that spirit: the continued exercise of critical thought as an attitude

of inquiry which counters modes of closed or conservative opinion. In
this respect the series aims to make thinking think at the frontiers of
theory.
Martin McQuillan
Editors’ Introduction
“What comes?” quizzically asks Elisabeth Roudinesco, eminent histo-

rian of psychoanalysis and interlocutor of Jacques Derrida. “Yes, what
arises unforeseeably,” Derrida responds,
what calls upon and overwhelms my responsibility [. . .] the event, the coming
of the one who or which [(ce) qui] comes but does not yet have a recognizable
figure—and who therefore is not necessarily another human, my likeness, my
brother, my neighbor.1
“It can also be,” Derrida adds, “a ‘life’ or even a ‘specter’ in animal or
divine form [. . .] and not only a man or a woman, nor a figure sexually
definable according to the binary assurances of homo- or heterosexual-
ity” (90–1/52). Derrida is in conversation with Roudinesco in a text
named after Victor Hugo’s poem and collected with other conversations
entitled For What Tomorrow . . . (2001). “Thinking What Comes”
serves as the title and the main motif of a discussion by Derrida and
Alain Minc, convened at the Sorbonne Auditorium on January 18,
1994, on the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Minc’s
Nouveau Moyen Age. First published in Derrida pour les temps à venir,2
the essay now appears in English translation for the first time, and sup-
plies the title of the present collection.
Thinking What Comes, comprised of two volumes, contains twenty-
five of Derrida’s thus-far-untranslated pieces ranging from informative
discussions in interviews, contributions to conferences and special
issues of publications, to prefaces to the works of friends, political
1 Jacques Derrida, De Quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), 90;

For What Tomorrow . . .: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (with Elisabeth Roudinesco)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 52 (translation slightly modified). All
further references are to the French original and are cited in the body of the text.
2 Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007), 19–62.
x Editors’ Introduction
messages, and documents. In this wide array of texts, all previously

unpublished in English, Derrida considers topics as varied as the world,
writing, the promise and its relation to the messianic, fidelity, loyalty,
filiation, hospitality, “poeticity,” substitution, and drug addiction. He
makes political interventions regarding issues concerning the identity
of Europe, recalibrating his own relation to that continent while calling
for the necessity of the founding and maintenance of a “new European
political culture:” delivers impassioned remarks about the question
of the fate of Palestine; looks at the role of Nelson Mandela in South
Africa; makes observations on the history of the foundation, the inspi-
ration for, and the position of the Collège international de philosophie
in the context of the French educational system; talks about the role of
intellectuals, particularly in France, their function and presence in the
media, especially on television; and opines on his relation to his own
image as well as the existing conditions of publicity photographs of
authors. He considers the question of the archive, which is no longer
attached to the stability of a topos, as a relation between preserva-
tion and forgetting, and participates in an interview with proponents
of “genetic criticism,” evaluating the issue of the rough draft and
exploring the role that drafts play in writing. Moreover, in accessible
interviews Derrida discusses current events, his relation to the United
States and to his philosophical contemporaries in France, in doing so
responding to being asked about the reception of his work in the US in
comparison to France. The selections contained in this collection not
only reveal the diversity of the questions posed to Derrida, but also
demonstrate the patience with which he responds to at times seemingly
random and unexpected queries.
Thinking What Comes also features singular, inventive apprecia-
tions of the work of friends such as Emmanuel Levinas (where Derrida
describes a “strange, singular, and exemplary” friendship between
Levinas and Maurice Blanchot and their “irreconcilable differends,” and
describes his own fidelity and possible resistance to Levinas’s discourse),
Marie-Louise Mallet (where Derrida composes an ode to the night and
that ineffable thing called music), Louis Marin (where Derrida writes, in
further reflections on Marin’s work, about the possibility of putting into
relation Heidegger and Marin on representation, as well as exploring
the relation between the remainder and the neuter, about which Marin
wrote extensively), Safaa Fathy (where Derrida makes her theatrical
piece go through a “trial by ordeal”), and Alain David (in whose work
Derrida investigates the “twins” racism and anti-Semitism, and inter-
rogates their relation to form and formalization, finding them both in
league with a certain “idealism”).
Editors’ Introduction
xi
This collection, which contains frequent references to and inquiries

about what could be understood by the word “fiction,” also highlights
an important facet of Derrida’s own w riting—what might be called
his inventions: two fertile, “writerly” prefaces to the works of less
well-known writers, Jos Joliet and Mathieu Bénézet. Additionally, in
revelatory interviews Derrida speaks of his experience of attending
school and his struggles there (and his expulsion as a Jew under the
Vichy regime), his performance at school examinations, and his own
emotional experience of the general environment, atmosphere, and
ambiance of various educational institutions. Also illuminating are
Derrida’s detailed discussions of what may be called the “mechanics”
and the physical conditions of writing—what Derrida himself labels
his “scene of writing” (from the types of pens and other writing imple-
ments used, the chronology of their adoption, and the organization of
his library to the placement of his desks and the location of his study).
This examination, Derrida admits, is not without its own “fetishistic”
and “auto-erotic pleasure.”
While the lead essay and the title of this collection refer to a revolu-
tionary interruption, a singular occurrence that surprises the ordinary
course of events, history, and politics—like a revolution—and that in its
coming cannot be expected, it is worth noting that Derrida is emphatic
about the role that thinking p lays—thinking in the face of what comes.
It might seem odd to be thinking something like “what comes” if what
comes is indeed unforeseeable, but in the title essay Derrida argues that
this thinking is so indissociable from doing that one must think “what
comes” together with “what is to be done?”
In the contribution called “Thinking What Comes,” galvanized by
the publication of Specters of Marx, Derrida speaks of the unprec-
edented and unique, describing the unforeseeable alterity and absolute
singularity of what happens as an event. Exploiting the French word
for the future, l’avenir, as he had in Specters of Marx, he meditates
on the second part of a word that he breaks up as à-venir, to explain
the coming upon us of what happens or occurs, or who comes. In his
talk Derrida insists that these unheard-of notions or terms themselves
remain other, coming unforeseeably, unpredictably, singularly, piercing
every horizon of expectation. This coming, maintains Derrida, needs to
be rethought and thought anew. And yet, to rethink what comes, we
cannot rely on knowledge, science, technology, philosophy, ethics, or
politics, for what comes or who comes can only come from somewhere
foreign (de l’étranger), as a foreigner (comme un étranger). It is also
worth bearing in mind that in thinking what comes or what happens,
according to the inexorable twists of Derridean thinking, what comes
xii Editors’ Introduction
does not always manage to arrive or does not entirely arrive in its
arrival. Thinking what comes, we are also compelled to accept that the
event can also happen not to happen or come, and remains marked by
an irreducible “perhaps.”3
3 On the “perhaps,” see Derrida’s illuminating exchange with Alexander García

Düttmann, “Perhaps or Maybe,” PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997):
1–17.
Acknowledgments
The editors warmly acknowledge the contribution of Andrew Kingston

to the revision of the translations in this volume, and to the proofreading
process.
In memory of Pleshette DeArmitt,
who first had the idea for this project
Part I
What Comes
Chapter 1
Thinking What Comes (2007)
“Penser ce qui vient” was originally published in Derrida pour les temps
à venir, edited by René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007), 19–62.
This paper was presented during an encounter with Alain Minc,
businessman, political advisor, and author, which took place at the
Sorbonne on January 18, 1994 following the publication of Derrida’s
Specters of Marx and Alain Minc’s Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (Paris:
Fayard). An extract appeared in the newspaper Libération.
Introduction
The solemn and intimidating hospitality of this amphitheatre seems

better suited to grand symphony orchestras than to critical debates. It
invites celebration or nostalgic commemoration. As if in counterpoint
to this session, I recall that, close to fifteen years ago, in June 1979, the
Estates General of Philosophy, which some friends and I convened, was
held here. Like the chosen title and symbolism of the Estates General, the
accents of that day were somewhat feverishly pre-revolutionary. Alas. I
had risked saying, at the opening of those Estates General, that for some-
thing to change, if not in philosophy, at least in the public institutions of
teaching and research, well, a political mutation would certainly not be
sufficient, but it would in any case be indispensable, at least in the form
of a change in the majority and at least so that something we could call
the future [l’avenir], to go quickly, remains open. In June 1979, already
lacking lucidity, I did not believe that this change in the majority would
occur so soon and, indeed, nothing assured us of such an acceleration.
What is certain is that, two years later, the fight, as some say, had not con-
Translated by Kas Saghafi and Chris Lucibella. Unless otherwise indicated, foot-
notes to this chapter have been provided by the translators.
4 What Comes
tinued, except for mavericks or isolated d reamers, and that the necessary
condition had not been sufficient, far from it. Neither for philosophy nor
for the rest. We have been speaking again, since Sunday, of the Estates
General of the Schools. I remind you of it in order to mark a French scan-
sion, a French date, and not only geopolitically French, at the opening of
this discussion. If, regarding what comes, today is again a day after, this
is not only a European or global day after, it is a French day after. And I
do not recall this only to create an atmosphere for this session.
As I was walking here a bit earlier, already out of breath due to this
scenario, I said to myself that, in these great amphitheatrical surround-
ings, we would certainly not be able to say and even less be able to think
what comes, for countless reasons, and in particular because we would
run out of time. So I asked myself what I should say, very quickly, in
a few sentences, if, arriving without preparation, I had to improvise an
economic, elliptical, dogmatic formula, which I would then only have to
attempt to explain or cash out in the time that I would be given. It would
be necessary that at least something be said quickly, in three or four
sentences, as when one writes on a computer during a strike, watching
out for a power outage.
So here: as for thinking what comes, what comes anew (“anew,” that
is to say, as new, novel, without precedent, without example, but also
which comes back [re-vient] anew in repetition), as for thinking what
comes in this way, namely the coming [la venue], the event, the to-come
[l’à-venir] of what comes and thus the unforeseeable alterity or absolute
singularity of what happens and of who comes upon us, but also from
us, by us, through us, I asked myself not only if I am not an atheist, a
radical atheist (like everyone is, I think, and it must undoubtedly be so
if what comes and who comes must remain other, novel, unforeseeable,
and unheard-of, and must therefore pierce every horizon of expecta-
tion, every teleology, every providence: I am speaking therefore of an
atheism or a secularism [laïcité] not at all like those personal convic-
tions, opinions, or ideologies that may or may not be shared by this
group or that, but of an atheism, a structural agnosticism as it were, that
characterizes, a priori, every relation to what comes and who comes:
to think the future is to be able to be an atheist), [I asked myself, then,
not only if I am not this kind of structural atheist], but once again an
atheist who remembers God and who loves to remember God, if it is still
possible to be an atheist and radically secular under these conditions.
I will try to explain myself as to the consequences that one could draw
from this, notably in relation to what we call politics, where its concept
is not separable from this atheism, this singular atheism, and why that
would not, certainly not, push me today to return to any messianism
5
whatsoever or to any Marxism whatsoever, but to recall together, in or

by the same gesture, a certain Marx and a certain messianicity. A mes-
sianicity that this time would be on the side of reason, of emancipation
(this word that ended up being suspect even for a certain political left)
and the Enlightenment of tomorrow, and not what one could oppose to
it. And I will try to explain why that cannot be done except by speaking
once more the language of revolution, of revolutions, and in the name
of a certain justice that, I think, is beyond (I will insist very strongly on
this “beyond”) the law (or non-law) and beyond what has previously or
recently been called the right and the left, beyond all the old partisan and
parliamentary divisions inherited from the Revolution of 1789, beyond
all the topologies that have cemented the opposition between the left
and the right, beyond all the scenes and images of revolutionary herit-
age. This justice of which I speak, and this emancipation, this structure
of the promise without which there is neither political reason nor reason
at all, can only be revolutionary and on the left. And on that basis it
would be necessary, oh, not the only necessary thing, even if it is also
necessary, as we say so often and so easily, to reconstruct the left, and
the parties of the left, to reconstruct the more or less common govern-
ment programs of the left, but to rethink (and I do mean rethink, think
the new anew, and I would like to take very seriously, I will say how, the
literality of our title: thinking what comes, if it is possible, where neither
knowledge, nor science, nor technology, nor even philosophy, perhaps
not even ethics or politics suffice, however necessary they remain), to
rethink this promised justice and those revolutions; and why, when we
are dealing with what comes, and it is necessary to revive the question
“what is to be done?” beyond its entire tradition, it can only come from
this side (where it would be necessary to understand the word “left” in
a highly novel fashion) and not from that side.
I don’t know if Alain Minc would subscribe to such a brutally dog-
matic affirmation; even if I believe it, in truth, to be hypercritical, we
will have to debate it, but this is my way of attuning myself, in my own
way, with what he said in his book about a “return of revolutions;” and
above all, this is my way of drawing the consequence of this truth that,
like him, I believe in, namely, this is his formulation, that “revolutions
have been a European invention.” And, he adds, “they are becoming
so once again” (p. 161). They are becoming European anew. This last
proposition is a very rich and perplexing logical matrix. I do not know
if we will have the time to explain all of its premises or consequences. If
I have the time, I will say why I would like to make it compatible, and
even identify it with, what I called at the beginning a radical atheism
that remembers God, a hypermnesic atheism that, here and now, today
6 What Comes
and tomorrow, regarding what comes, brings together within itself the
commitment to the messianic promise (not messianism), the revolution-
ary spirit, the spirit of justice and emancipation and, as retro as it might
seem here or there to those who have an interest in believing it, a certain
spirit of a certain Marx.
That is what I told myself in coming here, that I should say before
starting, in order not to forget in case we run out of time, and so that at
least no one would accuse me of not talking politics. Is it indispensable
to “talk politics” when we intend to think what comes? It is not certain,
even if the inclination is strong. To talk “politics” right away, and to
talk about the incalculable number of hitherto unencountered political
problems that darken with their terrifying menace the horizon of what
comes—we each show it in our own way—would be, perhaps above
all if we run out of time, the best way to avoid thinking the coming [la
venue], the event and the future of what [ce qui] comes—and of who
[qui] comes. Perhaps what comes or who comes (who by definition
can only come from abroad [de l’étranger] or as a foreigner [comme
étranger], even if they find themselves among us, on our soil or in our
blood) so radically affects the (also European) concept of the political in
all that links it to the polis, namely a certain state of the city, of the State,
of the ethnic group and the nation, of law, constitutional or not, of the
border in general, so that the question can no longer be simply politi-
cal, but is that of the political, and that’s another thing entirely, another
thing that is without a doubt anything but apolitical. But I don’t have
the courage, and I regret my cowardice, the courage of this provoca-
tion that would consist in responding to the generous invitation of Jean
Poperen and the opportunity to speak with Alain Minc without breath-
ing a word of politics. What would I look like and what breach of good
manners would it be if, ceding to my temptation, I spoke of something
completely other than politics, under the title of what comes, under the
pretext that thinking what comes is something completely other than
talking politics, and that talking about politics or the political is com-
pletely other than talking politics.
We are running out of time [Le temps vient à nous manquer].
This is how time always comes [vient]. This is how it comes to us
[nous vient]. We lack for time. It is given to us as that which we will
lack, and there can be no question here, to cite a certain, very French,
political motto, of giving time time [donner du temps au temps]. What is
to be done? What is to be done to gain time? And why does the question
“what is to be done?” always grapple with time given or refused? Lenin
said that one must, I quote, “outrun the course of events.” I will try to
return to this, but I realize that this is the first time in my life that I have
7
cited Lenin, and without doubt I was waiting for the right moment to
do so, that is to say, the worst moment, in the grand amphitheatre of the
Sorbonne where, no doubt, his name has not often rung out.
Thinking what comes, this means at least to gain time where time
wins and overtakes us [gagne et nous gagne], since it is gaining on us,
when history, what we still call with a trembling word, more enigmatic
than ever, “history,” gets ahead of us, pre-cedes us [nous pré-vient] in
the ineluctable experience of time that comes but that comes by running
out [qui vient en venant à manquer].
To come by running out [venir en venant à manquer], for time, takes
several distinct but indissociable forms:
1. anticipation (fore- sight, pro-

vidence, perspective, prospective, so
many words that mean the advance of a seeing and a knowing: think-
ing what comes, is that knowing [savoir] or seeing [voir] in advance?
I will try to say later why I doubt this);
2. improvisation or precipitation, the one with or without the other;
3. the responsible response to urgency and imminence.
These modalities of time that is running out, in the words that I just enu-
merated, incidentally, dominate the common lexicon of the two essays
that are at least the pretext for this meeting, and they characterize, it
seems to me, a common experience of historical time in which the inter-
minable concurrence of two laws make of tragedy, the tragic essence,
more than, and something other than, an epoch of Greece or the theatri-
cal tradition. These two laws are well known: there is the ineluctable,
on one hand, and the decision, on the other hand; there is necessity, on
one hand, and responsibility, on the other; there are phenomenal cau-
salities on one hand and, on the other, the intractable, undeniable call
to a responsible decision. These two laws can no longer be disentangled.
Division seems impossible between what comes upon us, what happens
to us, and what happens because of us and through us, for which we
must bear responsibility. At bottom, to think what comes is to rethink
responsibility, even before determining it as an ethical, juridical, or
political responsibility. Alain Minc’s book also closes with an appeal to
responsibility.
What is it to respond to what comes? And how to answer for what
comes? It is the experience of what comes as “this must happen,” “it
must come,” it—the other, he or she—must come because the ques-
tion “what comes?” must, without a doubt, make a place, and perhaps
the primary place, for the question “who comes?,” “what unidentifi-
able unknown?,” “what foreigner?,” “what arrivant?,” not “who goes
8 What Comes
there?,” as a diligent sentinel at a border post ready to fire would say,

not what legal subject or what subject-citizen, what “national subject,”
but “who comes?” X comes, which means X must come, but I don’t
know who and above all I don’t know if this “must” in “must come”
is that of a fatal historical necessity, as we say, believing that we know
what we are saying, or the assignation of my duty, where an undecid-
ability remains the condition for every responsible decision. And in any
case, these two “musts” tell me that time will run out, and that this is
even why we recognize a “must.” In other words, when what comes is at
stake, there is always a prescription, we are already under the prescrip-
tion of a certain economy of time. Not a homogeneous time, a smooth
quantity of time, but a rhythm of acceleration. The category of rhythm
(and, therefore, of transition and/or of revolution) ought to receive a
new dignity in historico-political analyses like those to which we were
invited tonight, as if the ultimate stake were, in the end, that of new
relations of speed, of scansion, or of acceleration. From the first pages
of his book, Alain Minc rightly speaks of acceleration, and I often do
as well. Now this word and the concept of acceleration, and therefore
of the capitalization of time, must still determine two laws that have
little in common: little in common with the topos or the stereotype of
the acceleration of history (who doesn’t speak of that?) and little in
common with each other. One of these two laws of acceleration has to
do with the essential role that science and the techno-economy of speed
play in a more and more decisive fashion in all the fields that we should
speak of tonight (whether it is in the market or financial speculation,
transport [of merchandise, ideas, styles, persons], communication and
the media, genetics or medicine, military-police intervention, political
decision and execution, etc. Knowledge, power, and the political are
more closely welded to one another than ever in capitalized accelera-
tion by this techno-economy of speed). But the other law, which comes
in its turn, as it were, to capitalize infinitely on the effects of the first
while being radically heterogeneous to it, is that if responsibility (ethical,
juridical, political), the responsibility of the decision in general, requires
knowledge, reflection, analysis, calculated anticipation, and a theoreti-
cal deliberation that must ask for, and take, time, it responds to what
comes, it is ordered to decide only where all delay is refused to it, when
history, as one says, does not wait. What comes does not wait at the
border or at the door, and for the same reason it does not ever repeat
itself, it never repeats any paradigm, neither that of the Middle Ages
nor of another (even though repetition or iterability always lodges itself
anew in the novelty of this non-repetition, we will perhaps speak of this
as well), and this is an a priori structure of the decision and of responsi-
9
bility before what comes. Whether we have a minute or a century at our

disposal, and whatever speed we have reached, whatever time is saved
by the formalization of knowledge or power that is never dissociated
from this, well, the moment of decision remains irruptive and structur-
ally independent of the moment of deliberation, prospective analysis,
or theoretical prognosis. Even if decision and responsibility depend on
it, and must depend on it, the response to “what is to be done?” breaks
with seeing and knowing, as with what unites power with seeing and
knowing: every decision is, must be, in this regard absolutely and essen-
tially precipitated, precipitous, in precipitation. Every decision, if there
is any, and I mean if there are any and if there must be any, is revolution-
ary in this sense. And atheistic, or even secular, in the sense I began with.
And it must be so, even if, beforehand, it must be prepared, reflected
on, matured, informed, deliberated, and meditated without amnesia for
as long as you like. This structure of absolute imminence and urgency
in the so- called responsible decision corresponds to a quasi- infinite
acceleration that appears heterogeneous to the law of techno-economic
acceleration, to its economy, to its market or wheeling and dealing, as
it is to the knowledge that assures us of it. These two laws and these
two accelerations will never be reduced to one another. That is why,
among other things, politics, political decision, decision in general—and
perhaps r evolution—is something also impossible, in any case improb-
able, or even unlocatable. Notably in its relation to what comes. That
is why we would have to debate such concepts as decision, revolution,
and therefore politics. It is here that I propose to speak of the messianic,
of messianicity, in a sense that remains quite alien to, even incompatible
with, messianism, the temptation of which one must fear, since it is once
again, as always, tempting, with the millenarianisms and the apocalypti-
cisms, at the moment of every great chaotic destruction, at the moment
where the great structuring oppositions collapse, where, as Schmitt
would say, we are losing, we believe we are losing our principal enemy
and therefore our political raison d’être, the political principle itself as
a statist principle. We are losing the political pole, not just to the North
but to the East.
In a moment I will propose a distinction in this respect, between what
I will call on the one hand politography (a space in which I feel myself,
practically without reservation, in agreement with the graphics, pre-
cisely, the descriptions, and analyses of Alain Minc regarding the state
of the world, the state of disorder or global chaos after the decomposi-
tion of a certain Eastern Europe—I prefer to name things in this way
out of prudence, without including either Marx, or communism, or
socialism—overwhelmingly in agreement with what he describes with
10 What Comes
names like—I recall a few of them—a “continent of chaos,” a “world

without a center,” a “return of revolutions,” an “end of Modern Times,”
etc.) and on the other hand (distinct from this descriptive analysis, of this
politographic diagnosis with which I feel myself in agreement), a sort of
politology, a meta-politics or, very simply, in another sense of the word,
politics, period, where agreement seems less clear to me or less assured,
in any case up for debate, where, I presume, each of us would be tempted
to situate, localize, circumscribe, and interpret the remarks of the other
within a larger whole whose axioms he held or defined (I will say in the
course of discussion how these two temptations to envelop or overflow
appear to me, temptations in which each of these two books could
interpret the other as a familiar symptom, and do so, I believe, unjustly.
Once again, it is not a matter of addressing these books, which cannot
and should not become the object of this session, but of using them as at
once typical and atypical schemas, of referring to them as two possible
approaches beginning with which, over the course of the discussion, we
could deploy experimental variations and measure differences).
In what comes, then, time comes, it runs o ut—and more than once.
It calls for the interruption of the instant, rupture of rhythm, precipita-
tion, and therefore revolution. Revolution is no longer only the taking of
power by a new ruling class, according to this or that inherited model;
it is first of all an absolute caesura in historical concatenation, an irrepa-
rable tear, the interruption of the entirely other in the warp or weft of
the political.
To gain some time, therefore, I will name, among a non-finite group
of possible themes for this discussion, only three “things,” three exam-
ples or three foci—at least in order to begin and to attempt to situate
myself in what I believe to be a crossroads, neither of agreement nor
disagreement (at bottom, both interest me relatively little) but a cross-
ing between the books that are the pretext for this session (I mean two
books which there is no question, once again, of making the very object
or the finality of the discussion: this would be neither desirable nor pos-
sible), The New Middle Ages and Specters of Marx, a singular crossing
between their multiple lines, a crossing that, for once, excludes neither
parallelism nor convergence, nor reciprocal encirclement nor opening,
nor incompleteness, a sort of co-implication, an open co-inscription
whose perplexing geometry I would like at bottom to interrogate, their
concurrence, status, possibility, regime, figure, and I will say even their
practical teaching, their common teaching, where it is necessary to
“think what comes” in asking oneself “what is to be done?”
Why “what is to be done?”? Why does this question, whether it is
explicitly posed or not, resonate so differently today than for all its
11
history from Kant to Lenin (the question “what is to be done?” can

no longer be the same as theirs, and here is the whole problem of what
comes)? And why does this question, whether or not it is posed out
loud, resonate so differently in these two books that I evoke not for
themselves but as more or less typical indicators? I was astonished by
this. Astonished, not, precisely, because of the innumerable differences
of all sorts that distinguish these two approaches (some perhaps would
be tempted to say that these two books, if they no doubt talk about the
same thing, have nothing in common, and that they even use foreign lan-
guages, untranslatable one into the other, which would already open up
interesting questions regarding what comes, since both treat, undeniably
and explicitly, what comes on a certain date, in our time today, and as I
often do in using these very words: “what comes”). If I was astonished
to hear the “what is to be done?” in relation to “what comes” reso-
nate differently, it is precisely because, beyond the differences of every
kind, I was struck, on the contrary, by the intersections and analogies
between two approaches that, at bottom, most often agree, in principle,
in what I will call very quickly the analysis or description, the identifica-
tion of signals, symptoms, geopolitical indicators: in geo-politography.
Naturally, Alain Minc’s book is in this regard incommensurably richer
than mine—whose principal aim was d ifferent—it is more sustained,
precise, and analytic. But most often what I just called polito-graphy,
the description of the state of political sites, in Europe and in the world,
identifies the same grid, privileging the same symptomatic markers,
sometimes to a degree of precision in its targeting that reassured me (for
example, the interest that both of us bring to the indicator called the
mafia, the global mafia and not only the Italian mafia, mafia incorpo-
rated, as you say, even as we were again very interested, each in our own
way, in the Italian symptom [which, in the past two days, has entered
a new phase], and in the network of arms and drugs sold by the mafia,
which is no longer a problem that can be circumscribed for a renewal
of the geopolitical analysis of what comes, and of relations among the
nation, the State, the citizenry, capital, international law, the relations
among the Eastern countries after what we call the fall of the Berlin
Wall, which, in my opinion, had begun in a certain way a long time ago,
etc. Another detail that is not a detail, but I could multiply them, is the
allusion that we both make to the Soros phenomenon, that stockbroker
and speculator who is said to be “brilliant,” a Hungarian emigré and
anti-communist militant who had put a good part of his capital in the
service of democratization in the East, but who also makes all the cur-
rencies and governments of the West tremble when at breakfast, without
any parliament, any worldwide congress, any parliamentary democracy
12 What Comes
having ever deliberated about it, he decides to make a telephone call or

send a fax in order to announce that this morning he no longer believes
in the franc or he will no longer support the lira). So, given this polito-
graphic convergence, this general agreement of the description, the
perspective and identification of symptoms, why, I asked myself, is the
polito-logical accent so different? And if the diagnostics are broadly rec-
oncilable, why does the logic of prescription appear so different in the
two cases? Why, in reading the polito-graphic discourses that I had asso-
ciated myself with in advance as it were, did I hear, in the same words, a
polito-logical music, a politics, indeed a thinking of the political so dif-
ferent, I wouldn’t say opposed, but other? In reading The New Middle
Ages, I was constantly saying “yes,” nodding my head in a movement of
appreciative approval, as though I were saying to myself “here, he says
what needs to be said, and better than I do, he says what I would have
liked to say, what I indicated only briefly and telegraphically, especially
in the chapter on usury and the ten plagues of the new international
disorder,” etc. How is it that, in the end, while I agreed with everything
or nearly everything, the desire still remained in me, which I call politi-
cal, or rather polito-logical, to change all the signs, all the characters of
the same text? When I say that I agreed with everything, I exaggerate
a little to gain some time. There are indeed three motifs to which I was
obliged to object, which are perhaps secondary and which I propose that
we leave to the side for a hypothetical end of the session. These three
motifs aren’t the three things that I will name in a moment. They are,
very quickly:
1. the reference to the Middle Ages; Alain Minc’s very subtle rhetoric
on this subject, a rhetoric in the use of this reference that without
a doubt shelters it from certain objections by historians but not
perhaps from every objection. This is once again the question of
what comes anew;
2. the reference to Cartesianism and to the relation between Descartes
and the nation-state named France;
3. the repeated and organizing affirmation according to which the law
of the market is a natural law (and one that must gain access to
culture: on this last point, I believe I understand and even approve
of what Alain Minc means to say, namely that there is nothing, in
any case nothing determinable, before and beyond the m arket—it is
in this sense that, for my part, I problematize the famous passages by
Marx on exchange value and on fetishism, in my book that is much
more critical and insidious with regard to a certain Marx than it may
seem; but for this very reason, it is important to note that this law of
13
the market, the deconstructive criticism of the nature/culture opposi-

tion, is the condition of every political intervention, of every inven-
tive decision, of every transformation, I will say of every political
revolution in the organization of the market. If the law of the market
were natural—or simply cultural—this wouldn’t be possible: we will
no doubt have to return to this).
I would have liked to discuss these three themes, but I propose that we
leave them for as late as possible, along with the 66 or 666 questions for
which I have prepared notes.
I said that I was going to name three things. Thinking is not knowing,
but is it naming? From the moment that what comes is at stake, that is
to say in the p resent—what comes is a verb in the present, it calls to the
present what happens here, there, now, insofar as it may happen soon,
tomorrow, it names the imminent coming of the future that is not yet
here, but that is in the process of arriving, right now, about to arrive.
I will try to say, if we have the time, why I believe it is a matter here of
thinking, then naming, attempting to name properly, that is, singulari-
ties, not only knowing or imagining, for example, and why thought, if
there is any, perhaps can be reduced, even if it is indissociable from
them, neither to science, to any science whatsoever, nor to philosophy,
still less to theology or ideology. Why, then, think what comes and
ask oneself “what is to be done?,” ask it of oneself as one must today,
as is necessary and as one cannot not do it, as one has never done it
before, since Kant or Lenin, as one must do it otherwise than them, (to
think what comes and ask “what is to be done?”), these are no longer
separable requirements. We cannot do anything about it: to think what
comes is to ask what is to be done. We are not thinking and we are not
doing anything as long as we disconnect the two injunctions, the former
hidden under a neutral infinitive and the latter under a question.
What are these three “things”? I chose them as I was deciding to
accept my responsibilities, then, at the moment when it was necessary
to gain some time, and without telling you, for lack of time, why and
how this choice, this alliance among formalizing calculation, chance,
and obscure desires precipitated this decision, therefore these exclu-
sions. These three things, I will give them proper names, their presumed
proper name, not only in order to save time, this time, but rather for
incalculable reasons, since these things come from apparently irreplace-
able, unsubstitutable, data and are therefore withdrawn from calcula-
tion. We will then be able to try to expose these three proper names to
more than one metonymy or more than one substitution. In truth, such
a metonymy, such a substitution of proper names, will be unavoidable,
14 What Comes
and here perhaps stands the law that presides over what comes, over
all thought of what comes. But for the moment, here now, these three
proper names appear to me to be, I will try to say why, irreducible and
untranslatable one into the other.
The first of these three names would be the messiah, the messiah in
general: not Jesus Christ, not any particular Messiah—and here a gen-
erality is already neutralizing the singularity of the proper n ame—but
what links the messianic, as a universal structure of experience, to the
proper name, to what/who comes [(ce) qui vient] and can come, now,
can be expected, hoped for, prepared for, promised in its c oming—both
as to come [à venir] and as event—only in the guise of the other, of
singularity, of the arrivant (foreigner or immigrant), of the idiom, that
is to say, also of the non-utopian here-and-now, of the revolution and
of justice. And the debate could be about what Alain Minc criticizes
or regularly dismisses under the name of messianism, to which he con-
nects a chain of other concepts (he speaks of the end of “messianism,”
of “democratic messianism” [pp. 44–6]; he associates it with eschatol-
ogy, myth, utopia, and he invokes Camus when he called for a “modest
political thought delivered from any messianism and stripped of nostal-
gia for terrestrial paradise” [p. 222]). Agreeing with him in this regard,
and making, at bottom, the same gesture, why, then, do I want to dis-
tinguish rigorously the messianic from messianism, even opposing them
as incompatible, and suggesting here that, with all these indissociable
concepts (revolution, justice, exposure to the alterity of the other, that
is to say, to what comes, to who arrives, to the arrivant as event or as
foreigner, to non-utopian urgency and to the ineluctability of the here-
and-now, to the promise beyond theoretical knowledge and program,
and even prescription), this messianic relation with what comes is irre-
ducible, I prefer to say incontrovertible, incontestable (one can’t testify
against it without immediately attesting to it), incontestable precisely
where, in his book, Alain Minc ends, at decisive moments, by appealing
to anticipation, to risk, to imagination, to invention, but also and by
the same token to obligation, and finally to the ethics of conviction and
responsibility? These are his last words. Now it is in order to respond
to this necessity of joining improvisation, invention, chance, and risk
to obligation (as he is right to remind us from one end of his book to
the other), that is, a certain rupture in historical temporality or in the
concatenation that we call current history, it is precisely in the name of
this “it is necessary [il faut]” and of this “it is necessary ‘to invent’ that
which seems impossible,” at the moment where “anything can happen”
(as Alain Minc says a number of times), that I will continue, as I will
explain later, to speak of justice and of revolution, in senses that it is no
15
doubt necessary also to reinvent, and which are in my view indissociable

from a messianic promise, at least as I interpret it in Specters of Marx.
This promise is announced from the first word of any political statement
whatsoever, in the explicit or implicit form of an “it is necessary.” And
in order to think what comes, it is necessary to think the implication of
this announcement.
Second proper name: Marx. Why, today, even as we would agree
here as well about what it cannot be a question of saving or repeating,
neither of Marx nor of Marxisms, nor any part of their legacy, agree
about what it cannot be a question of rehabilitating because one must
not and because it is in any case impossible, why today, here and now,
as to the name of Marx and the Marxist reference, are our strategies, our
rhetorics, and no doubt beyond strategy and rhetoric themselves, our
two languages, our two approaches, our two experiences appear to be so
distinct, opposed or heterogeneous? Why and in what sense, with what
protocols, can it appear necessary today, where something is coming,
still to recognize Marx, to put a stop to dogmatic conjuration and exor-
cism, to the censorship or interdiction that strikes everything, near or
far, that reminds us of him (even frightened leftist politicians erase from
their rhetoric anything that could connote a Marxist reference; even the
word “capital,” not to mention “capitalism,” radical “social critique,”
etc., now seems prohibited, indecent, or injurious)? Why is it necessary
to remove Marx’s name from everything Alain Minc is right to hold as
irreversibly discredited, useless, or dangerous, dare I say deconstructed,
under deconstruction at least since the end of World War II (and not
since the fall of the Berlin Wall), for the same reason as so many other
things on the brink of the abyss, of chaos, or of the desert in which we
are, when “anything can happen”? This return of Marx has nothing to
do with some “return to Marx” (a deplorably confused stereotype that
we have seen reappear here or there, in short, non-reading never missing
an opportunity to put itself on display). The insistent, ghostly return
[revenance] of a certain Marx, as what comes or comes back, but qua
departed, and concerning which the only urgency in my view is to lift
the repression, suspend the conjurational curse and the political prohibi-
tion, if only to reopen the critical discussion of this dogma or that thesis
which, in one manner or another, supposedly stems from Marx. Why
would it still be necessary, instead of conjuring him away, this departed
person, to call on him or hear something of his call in order to think
what comes? And first in order to understand, among other things we
will speak of later, what is happening for example in the East today, in
the East and in the Far East, I mean in China, and which is not simply
chaos? There is never chaos, pure and simple, but another thing, another
16 What Comes
structuration, another relation to law, to politics, to the State, and to the

market.
If I believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is necessary to insist today on
Marx (which I have never done before), even if only to keep open the
discussion with those who claim to follow him in a certain way, it is on
the basis of the analysis of a political symptom and according to a stra-
tegic choice. “Marx” is the proper name that concentrates, if I may say,
at the most energetic and consensual point of repression, the strongest
accumulation of denial and censure: in a work of mourning that remains
to be thought (I am trying to do this), to be thought politically, through
and beyond certain psychoanalytic schemas. It is not the only such
name (as I explain in this book), but it is perhaps one of the best levers
for a symptomatic [symptomale] and practical reading. And thus for a
strategy of intellectual and political intervention, for the most difficult
and therefore the most necessary political invention of today. I will try
to say why.
Finally, third proper name, France. Here and now, in French, French
people are speaking to French people. And if to think what comes is
also—I will come to this in a m oment—to re-hear the question “What
is to be done?,” it is in France, through what we believe we understand
under this name, that, citizens or not, we have to let resonate the ques-
tion “what comes?” That is to say, also to respond to what comes and
to respond, if it is possible, for what comes, to construct or reconstruct,
from top to bottom, a responsibility, a discourse, a politics, even a
concept of the political and of the juridical and an action in tune with
the thought of what comes and that I cannot dissociate from either
the revolutionary invention or interruption, or from the relation to a
messianic pledge [gage] (I will explain this expression later), that is to
say, a demand for justice that, beyond all the obsolete divisions, over
and above all the philosophies and political histories that have borne
this opposition and its topology— parliamentary or partisan— can
resound and be heard, I persist in thinking, only “on the left” and in a
revolutionary way. By a thinking that isn’t distinguished from a doing
(I prefer to say “doing” rather than “acting” or “action”). So, why
France? Why is Alain Minc’s book oriented by its end, that is, by the
heading of his last neo- Jacobin and virtually gallocentric— I do not
say nationalistic—chapter? This chapter, titled “The French Blessing
[grâce],” is not only one of the headings of this politography (every
chapter is a heading), that is the general heading of the b ook—and it
happens to be, if not the only chapter, at least the most prescriptive or
normative chapter, I will say even the most political or politological
chapter of his book: commitment of a proposition made to a State and
17
to a nation, call addressed to fellow citizens. Minc says, in short: given

the theoretical analyses that I have just proposed, do this rather than
that, let’s do this rather than that together, let’s assume our nation-
state responsibility. This chapter-heading or capital is the only one in
which the call to ethics and to responsibility resounds clearly: in the
name of a chance for France in the world that is coming and therefore
of what I would call, this is not his term, a mission of France today, of
France as nation-state and not as a people (here is the site of the most
anxious questions, to understate things, among those that I will pose in
a moment, notably on the subject of a France that would be, fortunately
according to him, “more homogeneous,” and of “the nation-state à la
française” as that which, says Minc, for whom it’s a cause for rejoicing,
but with words that frighten me, “remains a terrific means to integrate
and fabricate identity” [p. 236]. I would like to have a long discussion
on this point: is this true? Would it be desirable? And why “terrific,”
exactly? Under what conditions and for what future, etc.?). It is, first,
a call to hear the call that supposedly comes to us though this “French
blessing,” and to make of this privilege or this chance, if that is what it
is, an additional responsibility (“blessing obliges,” says Minc, which has
always been, I say this amicably and without suspicion, the rhetoric of
every nationalistic affirmation: we are charged with a greater responsi-
bility, we are, therefore we must be, we alone or we first, the exemplary
universal witnesses: of man and before the universe). If, regarding the
descriptive analysis, regarding the politography of this chapter, I have
few head-on objections, as tempted as I still am to complete or to turn
this scenery on itself a little in order to recall the dark shadow of what
it shows as rosy, especially the combination of political alliances that,
against the author’s wishes, this argumentation risks encouraging
among the neo- or archeo-gallocentrisms that are being reconstituted
(I count at least four types, two on the “right” and two on the “left,”
even if they don’t yet form a gang)—why is my book, at bottom, so
little French? Why is there virtually no political reference to French
matters, apart from a few indications taken from the realm of political
media coverage, or also, it is true, a very significant reference for me,
to Blanchot (Blanchot speaking of Marx after 1968) and to Hugo—not
the one who, at the moment of the Falloux Law, delivered admirable
speeches that deserve to be reread, but the Hugo of Les Misérables
when he spoke of “the spirit of the revolution” that breathed again in
1848—just as Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, evoked Der Geist
der Revolution. It is “the spirit of the revolution,” says Les Misérables
about a revolution, that of June 1848, which is “nearly impossible to
classify in the philosophy of history.” . . .
18 What Comes
(Let me interrupt this quotation for a moment: it is perhaps the implicit

subtitle for and contract of this session: thinking what comes as what is
“nearly impossible to classify in a philosophy of history,” that is to say,
I would also like to suggest this, a revolution in the concept of revolu-
tion, also in its imagery, in its rhythm, in its phenomenality, a revolution
without barricades, without any protests in the street, without occupying
radio and television stations—despite the entirely different but equally
necessary upheaval of the media in their totality—a revolution in the
thinking of revolution and in the revolution as event, as the only possible
event, however direct and silent it may be, sometimes through new tech-
niques and incredible velocities which we will talk about: if one concept
and one symbolic schema of revolution are gone forever, what comes
can only be an acceleration and a multiplication of revolutions, and
more radical revolutions than all others we have known. This doesn’t
necessarily contradict what Minc says in his chapter on “The Return
of Revolutions,” even if, in the multiplicity of hypotheses he evokes,
a certain dimension of revolution and, as he puts it, of revolution as
“European,” risks being erased or disintegrated. It is to this spirit of revo-
lution that we must be faithful, perhaps, if we are to think what comes.)
“The spirit of revolution,” continues Les Misérables, “covered with
its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which
resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic
basket of rubbish. It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.”1 This passage
is dear to me above all because it speaks of a duplication, of a doubling
of the revolutionary event, twice the Revolution, and of a revolution of
the revolution, of a revolution against the Revolution—about which I
will soon say a word, if I have the time.
So why, for what, in view of what France and France entre nous?
What are we to think of it, beyond agreement and disagreement,
between polito-graphy, polito-logy, and politics?
Having convoked these three proper names, Messiah, Marx, France,
and while promising to return to them in some kind of address,
response, or apostrophe in the direction of each of these proper names
and of my neighbor, I would have liked to take the liberty or to ask your
permission to digress a little, the time of an exercise or a little prologue,
to sound a few notes, play a few scales, in a sort of short preliminary
meditation. A sort of rehearsal before beginning. I will not do it right
away, since I have already spoken for too long. In responding to Alain
Minc, to whom I now give the floor, I will perhaps risk giving this small
1 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Complete in Five Volumes, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm.
19
prologue before returning to the question of the three themes or proper

names. And if we have the time, I will then ask the 666 questions for
which I’ve prepared some notes.
What is to be done—with the question

“What is to be done?”—?2
[What is to be done? To think what comes. Is it necessary? And then,

how to do it? What is to be done? And what to do with this imperative?
In what tone should we take it? From what height?]
A certain aplomb is already necessary, no one here doubts it, an aplomb
that some consider, perhaps rightly, somnambulistic, to dare, wherever
it may be, even while denying it, even in the tone of counter-prophecy, to
indulge all in all quite calmly, in diagnosis, or even prognosis about the
state of the world, and to advance unashamedly what amount to pano-
ptic overview reports on the state of the world, on the state of the union
or the disunion of Europe and the world, on the state of the States in the
world, on the new world order or disorder, and even to allow oneself, if
only while denying it, geopolitical prescription or counter-prescription.
All while suggesting that geopolitical discourse is getting paralyzed in
a kind of impasse or generalized aporia: nothing works any more and
anything can happen. The aplomb consists here in authorizing oneself
to give a global and panoramic overview from a sort of rampart, but at
the edge of the abyss, the desert, or chaos. This aplomb of overview [sur-
plomb] can appear somnambulistic, it is an approach [une démarche],
precisely, a displacement, a step, a movement or an action, a “doing”
guided by that strange concern for vigilance that keeps sleepwalkers safe
at the moment of greatest risk. Sleepwalkers walk on the edge of abyssal
chaos, and just when they know and declare that everything is going
wrong, that nothing is working, that everything ends up in the non-path,
the impasse, the aporia, at the moment they are persuaded that even this
panoramic, if not systematic discourse is obsolete, they advance, if not
like fools, visionaries, prophets or poets, people who are hallucinating,
then at least like dreamers who believe or who want to keep their eyes
open (the “active pessimists,” Alain Minc would say). If I name dream
2 [Note to the French Edition] This second sequence, undelivered, should have
preceded, if time had permitted, the responses to Alain Minc, after the latter’s first
intervention, on the three themes announced in the introduction (messianicity,
Marx, and France). The square brackets indicate what could have been omitted,
here or there, in order to save time.
20 What Comes
right away, without dissociating it from sleepwalking, it is to take both,

as they say, in good faith [en bonne part]. Not to neglect the absolute
risk that the sleepwalker runs, quite the contrary, but to approach that
which, beyond knowledge and philosophy, political or not, even beyond
all the prescriptive models and norms whose exhaustion we are experi-
encing, the thought of what comes can only be the ally of what is related
to dreaming, and even to the poetic, provided that, obviously, one thinks
the dream otherwise than is often the case. I recall that, to the question
“what is to be done?” (which Alain Minc evokes in passing as “an old
question that Lenin bequeathed us” [p. 221]), to what I’ll say is both a
very old question, no doubt, yet not as old as all that, but also a brand
new question, a still unheard-of question. Lenin responds, among other
things, and with interesting precautions, “one must dream.”
[I ask myself where our hybris can come to us from, unless it is also innocence,
unconsciousness, and therefore the infantile, incorrigibly childlike humility of
such an aplomb, such insolent audacity that is ours here. I say “childlike”
because, even if I don’t know Alain Minc very well, “personally” as they say
(I met him briefly just before this session), what I read and perceive of him on
the public stage makes me think that what brings us closer, perhaps, beyond
so many differences that I will not try to enumerate, is that, on the public or
political intellectual stage, some might think that we have both maintained
(if he will pardon me this abusive alliance or doubtful annexation) a certain
youthfulness, with all that such youthfulness can expose of innocent fresh-
ness, unconscious fragility, but also self-assurance or insolence, incongruity,
inopportune impoliteness.
So, we turn up, and whatever the age may be of what we know, by experi-
ence or knowledge, we don’t know where it comes to us from, this aplomb
on the verge of what makes us laugh, cry or above all stagger in the void.
But I will not stop at the hypothesis according to which this somnambu-
listic hybris that destines us to aplomb and to overview would be anyone’s
character, Minc’s or mine, for example: I believe on the contrary that our
time, what we are speaking about, what is coming perhaps through chaos,
desert, abyss, global disorder, the general deconstruction of all the figures of
an apocalypse without apocalypse, etc., this requires us to think and to think
from this fragile aplomb and puts us here, in this situation, situates us where
thinking, and thinking (politically and poetically) what comes (and so the
future in the present) can only be done from the place of this simultaneously
somnambulistic and vertiginous aplomb.]
Where does this aplomb come from, in general?

Call it aplomb. What do we call aplomb? In whatever way you hear it,
pronounce it, or write it, “aplomb” is a very beautiful term. Not a good
word nor even a well-formed concept, but a beautiful term. Not because
of homonymic temptations that make it capriciously drift toward the
injunction or the call (when we call out, when we are called by the call
21
because we cannot think what comes without projecting or hearing

some call, something like an injunction, a duty, a law, a prescription,
without trying to hear right, to hear rightly something that I call justice,
a call that in some way comes from us but also comes upon us, a call by
which we call to ourselves from the other); let’s not speak, then, of these
homonymic games or of all that the word “aplomb” can signify very
precisely, in physiology, in architecture, in painting and even in music,
but of the sign that it always makes toward the assurance of a “standing
upright” [tenir debout], toward a physique regulated toward vertical-
ity, that is to say, on what a plumb line indicates to us about terrestrial
gravity and therefore about the earth: for let’s not hide it from ourselves,
the questions that we take up today with such somnambulistic aplomb
are nothing less than the questions of the earth (in whole and in part, in
a way that is as urgent as it is concrete, imaged, immediate, immediately
ethical, juridical, geopolitical—questions of geopolitics at the edge of
and beyond questions called geopolitical: what is to be done, what are
we going to do with the earth, on the earth? And the question of what
stands upright on the earth is not only an ecological question, even if
it remains on the horizon of what might be more ambitious or radical
about ecology today), questions of the earth, then, and questions of the
human (upright or not on the earth): what is the human, what is the iden-
tity or the unity of the human on the earth and beyond the earth, beyond
the upright stance, beyond the planetary and perhaps even the geopoliti-
cal that we are thinking completely differently today, perhaps completely
differently than in the Middle Ages and even than in a certain modernity?
It is perhaps in order to resist, in order to not give in to the vertigo
that seized me before such a session, on the verge of such a staggering
program, that I give myself the aplomb and assurance needed in order
to dare to pose the question: what is to be done? What is to be done,
here, now? And here, now, what is to be done with the question “what
is to be done?” This is a strange question, a redoubled, reflected question
that seems to clash with our title “Thinking What Comes” as if it were a
matter, from the first sentence, of substituting doing for thinking, while
replacing an imperative, “to think what comes,” with an interrogative,
“what is to be done?,” and even by a double interrogative: “What is to
be done with the question ‘what is to be done?’?”
That is not at all my intention, nor is it to confine myself to such an
abstraction. Since the question “what is to be done?” seems for the
moment as indeterminate as the injunction “to think what comes,”
even if we add, as I did just now, “here and now,” without saying if I
am thinking of the “here-and-now” of this session or of the here-and-
now of France, of Europe, of the earth or the world, which are so many
22 What Comes
different places and therefore distinct and sometimes non-configurable

points of view. I indeed said “the world” because, at the moment of
choosing a title, we had considered “thinking the world,” no less, before
we settled on “thinking what comes,” and I will no doubt say a word
about that later, trying to demonstrate that, despite their obvious ambi-
tion and without their apparent excessiveness, these two titles are acute,
exclusive, and determined in what they prescribe or promise.
But if continuing to think is what we must do, and if thinking is also,
immediately and ineluctably, thinking what must be done in the face of
what comes, that is to say, in the face of what arrives and the event to
come [à venir], then, in or in the face of what comes, this task would
open onto another experience of what should join doing with thinking. I
believe such a task is, despite appearances, both new, hitherto unknown
in its historical forms and more urgent, more imperative than ever
today, here and now.
I’m grafting what I just said about such an imperative alliance between
doing and thinking onto a remark of Alain Minc’s, on a specific page of
his book, notably when he speaks (p. 219) of the figure that mathema-
ticians call an “empty set” and where Alain Minc situates the call for
what is refused or forbidden to us today, namely, I quote, “a philosophy
of action.” Intellectuals seem to be retreating from “public debate,” he
notes, and this is not out of lack of interest in public affairs, but because,
I quote, “society is no longer ‘thinkable,’” (he puts quotation marks
around this word to which I would also like to return later: what do we
call thinking here?) and after having noted both the necessity and the
sterility or the failure of a “pluri-dimensional reflection” and the “postu-
lated” “urgency” of mixing economics, sociology, ethnography, politi-
cal science, and history, he asks: “What will we have concretely achieved
other than dreaming [my emphasis] of intellectual giants who don’t
exist? Their absence is perhaps not fortuitous: these kinds of additions
between such diverse forms of knowledge no doubt corresponds to what
mathematicians call an empty set. It must be a philosophy of action.”
Certainly, Alain Minc remains ironical or skeptical toward this dream
and this philosophy of action (and I don’t believe any more than he does
that the urgency of “doing” or of the question “what is to be done?”
can have its measure taken by a philosophy of action or that philosophy
of history, about which Hugo already said that we cannot inscribe in it
the events that come from us or upon us). He believes, rightly, it seems
to me, that the objectives that could orient such a philosophy of action,
beginning with a certain idea of progress, have been destroyed. But it’s
in vain that he directs the same irony, an irony that, by the way, I find
to be deserved, at all prescribers (“Good luck, gentlemen prescribers!”
23
[p. 219]), what gives his book its aplomb and keeps it upright, from
head to toe, is the final chapter that is a prescriptive and normative call
for French responsibility, and not only to the people of France, but to
the nation-state called France, to fellow citizens.
I would like to risk a word, only a word (everything today will be
too brief) on the subject of the question “what is to be done, here and
now?”: if, first of all, it is welded to the thinking of what comes, if it
cannot be separated from that thinking, such a question, let’s not forget,
is already a legacy, it has a very noble genealogy, at once ethical and
political.
The question “what is to be done?” has a history, even if it seems to
refer to a necessity for all days, for all times, for all ages and all cultures;
this question has a very acute history, a critical history, and this critical
history is a modern history. The seriousness of what c omes—but this
is also a chance for what comes to be truly what comes, that is to say
absolutely u nprecedented— new—without example and resistant to
every possible r epetition—is that we no longer know what to do, today,
with the question “what is to be done?,” in both its form and in content.
We inherit it, but something of its legacy eludes us, and we have to
reinvent even the very conditions of this question.
In this literal form, if I am not mistaken, the question “what is to
be done?” is not medieval and it could not have been so, no doubt for
essential reasons.
In the form we have inherited it, both from Kant and from Lenin, it is
a modern question in a precise sense whose radicality could be deployed
neither in the Middle Ages nor by a Cartesian post-Middle Ages, that
is to say in what was then called the world and that was bordered,
determined, in all the senses of this word, by a theological, anthropo-
theological or theologico-political horizon. The question “what is to be
done” could not yet emerge, in its radicality, so long as a democratic,
secular, lay [laïque] idea hadn’t pierced this anthropo- theologico-
political horizon or begun to undermine its foundations.
But conversely, and this is the whole problem of what comes today
and of what constitutes the acute specificity of our times, the question
“what is to be done?” can no longer be deployed in all of its power, that
is to say without horizon, as long as a horizon, or theological or onto-
theological assurances, continue to surround it, as is still the case for
Kant and Lenin, who had or presumed a certain idea of humanity or of
revolution, of finality, of the final stage, of final adequation, of the telos
or of a regulative idea on the basis of which arose the question “what
is to be done?,” which then indeed became possible, but thereby non-
vertiginous, non-abyssal, halted in its limits, that is to say in its horizon.
24 What Comes
The question “what is to be done?” is an ethical and political ques-

tion, certainly, but specified, then, by a modernity, and twice by a pre-
revolutionary critical modernity, and twice by men who intended to
speak in the name and in view of a certain democratic emancipation.
Kant and then Lenin let the question “what to do?” resound, and they
both did it just before revolutions that we have not yet thought through
(since in order to think what comes, it is necessary to think what has
happened, and the difficulty in thinking the future is ipso facto the pause
faced with a past that all of a sudden becomes more enigmatic than
ever, open to all reinterpretations, indeed to all revisions: things would
be simple if we knew what will have been the Middle Ages, and if we
are sufficiently out of the Middle Ages, in what sense, in order to risk
or to have to return, once again, toward some new Middle Ages). Kant
and Lenin had both, then, launched and reflected on a “What is to be
done?”; they wrote it in this literal form on the eve of two revolutions
whose more and less than death, decomposition, putrefaction we are so
strangely living through, these two revolutions that we mourn. And it is
indeed from there that we set out or speak. In any case, it is undeniable
that the two books that form the pretext of this discussion are, within
themselves (and not only by their external date of publication), histori-
cally marked by the aftereffects of these two revolutions. They both say,
and this is the least of what they have in common, that the Western
euphoria and the neoliberal triumph that made chests swell at the end of
the Soviet period were as artificial as an artificial lung and as short-lived
as the most blind denials.
[These two books couldn’t have been written, something in them
couldn’t have been written, and here is the minimal certitude that we can
have in this regard, either before or during these two revolutions—let
me clarify: these two revolutions, those that gave themselves the name
“revolution,” the revolution of 1789 or that of 1917. The first lines of
Alain Minc’s book make reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And this
mark, this internal date, is repeated throughout his whole book.]
[In any case, whatever we make of this synchrony or this coincidence,
the question “what is to be done?” will have always resonated at the
edge of the abyss or of chaos, before the most indeterminate, anxiety-
producing horizon, when, it seems, everything must be rethought, re-
decided, re-founded, from top to bottom and where perhaps the bottom,
the ground, and the foundation come to be lacking. Because chaos (a
word present in the title of the first chapter of Le Nouveau Moyen Age)
is the form of every future as such, of everything that comes (a future
[avenir] that is already foreseeable in its order and its form wouldn’t be
yet to come [à-venir]). The event is chaotic in its essence. On the other
25
hand, the open abyss of khaos is also the open and gaping form of my
mouth (khainô), of the mouth agape, when I do not know what to say,
but also when I call out or I am hungry.]
I began by naming the revolution. I did so without delay, in order to
set the tone and show the colors. Because, at the risk of causing surprise,
here or there, by speaking in favor of the revolution, in the name of revo-
lution and in allowing myself some words that we generally associate
with it and judge to be more and more archaic or outmoded today, more
and more retro (revolution, justice, equality, emancipation, etc.), in
trying to emphasize that, even if I was not the last, during the last three
decades, to be wary of all the schemas and watchwords that have been
associated with them and with revolution for so long, with two great
European revolutions, with narratives that have been bequeathed to us,
with justice, with equality or emancipation, and if I have rarely spoken
the word “revolution,” it is to the extent that this political eloquence
was determined by imageries, schemas, scenarios, models, representa-
tions, even concepts that are at the same time deconstructible and today
more destroyed and obsolete than ever. But a certain revolution in the
very idea of revolution, in its concept and in its schemas [to speak like
Kant, in what links its idea to its concept and to its intuition], in its sym-
bolism, its images, its theatre and its scenarios, another revolution—and
therefore another watchword of justice, equality, emancipation, etc.—
another revolution is not only what commands us to answer the ques-
tion “what is to be done?,” however difficult, however indiscernible that
question seems, but even and first of all inspires and commands and
dictates to us the question “what is to be done?,” a question that I would
like to read at the heart of Alain Minc’s book, another reason to say
to him, in order to startle him or simply to make him laugh, that, with
the exception of this or that denial (but the logic of denial is the whole
problem of political discourse), with the exception of such a denial, his
book has, that is to say it should have, a revolutionary inspiration.
We will not have the time to speak about Kant and Lenin. That is a
shame, for I believe in the urgent necessity of doing so, as patiently as
possible. I will content myself with isolating two features. First, a feature
relevant now, super-timely or untimely [un trait actuel, suractuel ou
inactuel] of the Kantian question. It responds (for a question already
responds) to what Kant calls the interest of my reason. This interest is
both speculative and practical, and it links three questions: “What can
I know?” (Was kann ich wissen?), a speculative question; “what should
I do?” (Was soll ich tun?), a moral question that as such doesn’t properly
belong to the critique of pure reason; and “what may I hope for?’(Was
darf ich hoffen?), which is at the same time practical and speculative.
26 What Comes
Now, in the sequence of these three questions, the median question

“what should I do?” (Was soll ich tun?) is linked in a complicated but
irreducible fashion, as it is today, to the question of being-able-to know
[pouvoir-savoir], of science, of “what may I know?,” that is to say also
“what may I do thanks to knowledge?,” but also to the theoretico-
practical question that is like the common root of the two: “What may
I hope for?” (I insist here because of the revolutionary messianicity that
is necessarily implied in it).
Now this question of hope, at once shared by all three and therefore
first, is indeed the question of the future of what comes, of what happens
[arrive], of what can happen as what must happen. Hope, says Kant,
jumps to the conclusion or is tantamount to concluding that something
is [or would be, sei] (which thus determines the last possible goal)
because something must happen (weil etwas geschehen soll). Knowledge,
however, concludes that something is (or would be) (which acts as the
supreme cause) because something happens (weil etwas geschicht). But
if the question of hope is related to the question of what comes as “this
must happen,” if it not only is always presupposed, implied by the spec-
ulative question of knowledge and by the practical question of “what is
to be done?,” but also ties them together, we also know that elsewhere
(in his Introduction to his course on Logic) Kant subordinates these
three questions to a fourth. Which? That of man (“What is man?”), man
as a cosmopolitan being, as a citizen of the world.
The first three questions, and the one that grounded them and gath-
ered them together as the question of hope before the coming of what
happens, proceeded from the interest of human reason—the reason of
man, therefore, not as a natural being but as a citizen of the world, not
as a political subject belonging to this or that nation, citizen of this or
that State, but as a cosmopolitical citizen. And Kant was not content
to juxtapose the fourth question with the three others. The first three,
including, then, “what should I do?” and “what may I hope for?,” must
be attributed to fundamental anthropology since these three questions
depend on the fourth.
Without imposing a dissertation on you, I merely note that, regard-
ing the horizon of this anthropology and the international law that was
supposed to order this thought of the cosmopolitical, of citizenship,
of relations among nations and of the sovereignty of States, etc., Kant
believed he could take his rule from Ideas, regulative Ideas that also
remained onto- theological and that allowed the questions of action
and of hope to be formed, certainly, but at the same time they were as
if neutralized, closed off in advance by a sort of anticipated response.
Formed and closed [formées et fermées] in a single blow. The condition
27
of possibility of their formation immediately seals their closure. One

believed one knew what to do as soon as one could pose the question of
what to do. Is it useful to underline that, today, this regulative horizon,
which has deconstructed as if by itself, is more indeterminate than ever,
as is the response, even if it is by anticipation and presumption, to the
question “what is man?,” to say nothing of the question that concerns
the world, man as citizen, as what can relate or not relate democracy to
the State and to the nation? This question of the essence of man is not a
question of abstract metaphysical speculation for professional philoso-
phers: it is posed today in concrete and everyday urgency, to legislators,
to scholars, to citizens in general (whether it is a matter of problems
related to the so-called human genome, to capital, to capitalization, and
to appropriation, whether by the state or not, of knowledge, of techno-
knowledge on this subject in databases), the enormous problem of
capitalization and of the right of appropriation that still remains intact
before us, along with the question of property in general and of property
of one’s own body (a biotechnological question of the graft, of prosthe-
ticity in general, of artificial insemination, of the mother as surrogate
mother, etc., of sexual difference and of the right of women over their
bodies, of artificial intelligence, of the history of the concepts defining
human rights, the subject, the citizen, the relations between humans and
the earth, human and animal, the immense so-called ecological debate,
etc.—we could, if you wish, specify this ad infinitum). Our questions
“what should I do?” and “what may I hope for?” can no longer, there-
fore, forget their Kantian (and pre-revolutionary) history, any more
than they can rely on them and repeat them. It is because we no longer
have at our disposal either their premises or their teleological horizon
that our “what is to be done?” is at one and the same time more desper-
ate, more destitute and, by the same token, closer to what it should be
(that is, destitute, open once more to absolutely radical irruption, even
on the subject of who poses the question: if this question is to keep its
radical force, we should not even presume that we know who poses it,
or whether this question is properly human and what that can mean,
properly man’s or woman’s, or even for which revolution it defines the
pre-revolutionary space).
That is why it is not only necessary to think, it is more urgent than
ever, and this doesn’t come down to an exercise of knowledge or of
power, and it supposes on the contrary some supplementary vigilance
in this respect, but to think that these stakes of thought (for example,
the question of the human and of the being of human, and of life, the
question of life and its prostheses, of tele-commuting, the question of
production and the question of being, where it governs the still totally
28 What Comes
new question of “what is to be done?,” the question of the “come”

[viens], the question of justice, which I’ve tried to show, in Specters of
Marx, was indissociable from that of the presence or non-presence of the
present, etc.), these stakes, which you will have to excuse me for naming
telegraphically, impose themselves each moment, daily, immediately,
at every step, with every sentence, as they have never yet done before,
on anyone, but in particular on those who make it their profession, in
other words, those who claim to exercise the mandates of responsible
decision-makers, magistrates or cabinet ministers (politicians of every
sort, legislators or not), men and women of science, teachers, media
professionals, advisors and ideologues in every domain, particularly in
politics, ethics, or law. All of these people would be radically incompe-
tent not, paradoxically, if they knew in advance, as they almost always
believe they do, what man is, etc., what life is, what “present” means,
etc., what “just” means, what “to come” means, that is to say the arri-
vant, the other, hospitality, gift. They would be incompetent, as I believe
that they so often are, because they believe they know, because they are
in the position of knowing and are incapable of articulating these ques-
tions and learning how to formulate them. They know neither where nor
how these questions were formed, and where and how to learn how to
reformulate them.
I would have liked to propose an analogical argument on the subject
of Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” from 1901–1902, but time has finally
run out. I recall what, in this text as in Kant’s, has not gotten old today:
the condemnation of “lowering the theoretical level” for political
action, the idea that every theoretical “concession,” in Marx’s words, is
harmful for politics, as well as the condemnation of opportunism (it is
also necessary to think and act with contretemps, against the current),
the condemnation of spontaneism, of economism, and of national chau-
vinism (which doesn’t suspend the national tasks), the condemnation
of the “lack of a spirit of initiative” in political, that is, revolutionary
leaders, who should take risks and break with the ease of consensus and
received ideas (this is what Alain Minc proposes in a book that is, at
bottom, so very Leninist), and above all, what has aged less than ever,
the analysis of what unites internationalization, the globalization of the
market and of politics to science and technology. All this can be read in
Lenin’s “What is to be Done?”.
But the revolutionary subject of this cosmopolitical horizon, which
orients Lenin’s “What is to be Done?,” is no longer the Kantian subject
of law and of his revolution. It is no longer the same “what is to be
done?” This new “what is to be done?” prescribes a revolution in the
concept of revolution.
29
For what matters for us today, regarding what comes and what we
said at the beginning about speed and the two heterogeneous laws of
acceleration, it would be necessary to interrogate what Lenin says about
dreams in the political decision. He pretends to be afraid of realistic
Marxists who will remind him, against utopia, that humanity according
to Marx assigns itself only tasks that are realizable and in accord with
the objects that grow along with the party itself; and so Lenin takes
the opposite stance from this realistic logic, as a logic of the party, and
under the cover of a quotation from Pisarev he praises dreams in politics,
albeit by making the distinction between two dreams and two intervals
between dreams and reality. The good interval, the good dream, is when
my dreams, I quote, “run ahead of the natural march of events,” or
again, I quote, come “to overtake the present.”3 “Of this kind of dream-
ing there is unfortunately too little in our movement,”4 notes Lenin.
The bad oneiric disjunction is when the gap is hopeless and anticipates
nothing: when the thought of adventure, without which there is neither
future nor even political event, without which nothing comes, becomes
the plaything of adventurers and adventurism.
Since my intention is not, either here or elsewhere, to give an apology
for Marx or Lenin, and still less for Marxism-Leninism as a whole (you
can imagine that this doesn’t interest me very much), I situate in a single
word the site where Lenin sutures in his turn the question “what is to be
done?” and this radical possibility of disjunction without which there is
neither the question “what is to be done?,” nor dreams, nor justice, nor
relation to what comes as a relation to the other; and this suture or this
saturation condemns to totalizing and totalitarian fatality the left’s or
the right’s revolutionarisms [révolutionarismes]. The point is that Lenin
measures the gap in terms of “realization,” that is his word, in terms
of the adequate accomplishment of what he calls the contact between
dream and life. The telos of this suturing adequation—which I have tried
to show also closes off Marx’s philosophy or o ntology—closes off the
future of what comes. It prohibits thinking what, in justice, always pre-
supposes incalculable inadequation, disjunction, interruption, infinite
transcendence. This disjunction is not negative, it is the very opening
and the chance of the future, that is, the relation to the other as what
comes and who comes. The minimal definition of justice that, in Specters
of Marx or Force of Law, I distinguish as much from law as I oppose
3 D.I. Pisarev, “Blunders of Immature Thinking,” quoted in V.I. Lenin, “What Is

to Be Done?,” Collected Works, volume 5; trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), 509.
4 Ibid., 510.
30 What Comes
it to a whole tradition, including Marx’s, Lenin’s, or Heidegger’s, is the

one given in a brief but uncompromising manner by Levinas, when he
says, speaking of this irreducible inadequation, of this infinite dispropor-
tion, “the relation with the Other, that is to say, to justice.”5
5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press, 1969), 89.
Chapter 2
Substitutions (2001)
“Substitutions,” in Toxicomanie et Devenir de l’Humanité, edited by

Claude Olievenstein (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001), 81–108.
Discussion of the work of psychiatrist Claude Olievenstein, director
of the Marmottan Medical Center, and the work being done there for
the treatment of drug addiction.
Substitution, or substitutions, because there are always more than one

of them—how to treat this subject? There are, for that matter, you will
immediately notice, not so secret affinities between the words “substitu-
tion” and “subject,” even if they cultivate the elective underside of two
words in “sub,” as if a subject were that which in advance submits itself
to, or subjects itself to, what we call a substitution. How, then, to treat
this subject that we call “substitution”?
Among those who treat [traiter] drug addicts just as among those who
deal with [traiter de] drug addiction, some accredit, without reservation,
the word “substitution,” I am to understand, and especially the expres-
sion “substitute product.”
There is here, as though contained in these words, “substitution” and
“substitute product,” a wealth of semantic confidence. This credit is in
no way diminished by the debates that are raging over substitute prod-
ucts, for example, methadone or Subutex.
Because even when one is suspicious, for thousands of reasons, of so-
called “substitute products,” the meaning of these words is in no way
discredited.
Whether one is for or against, both for and against, somewhat for or
somewhat against (sometimes “in desperation” as Claude Olievenstein
just said), we are supposed to know, to that very extent, to the extent of
Translated by Bradley Ramos.

32 What Comes
agreement or disagreement, what these words mean or what we mean

by them.
Now, even before beginning, I will put forward a working pre-
hypothesis. There are at least three concepts of substitution. Let us be
more precise. Rather than three concepts, let us say that there are three
usages, three types of discourse, three semantic regimes, three codes, or
three fields of relevance for the word-concept substitution.
These three “logics,” if you prefer to call the thing this way, are not
only different, dissociable, but radically heterogeneous among them-
selves, so much so that the three names of “substitution” are, in this
regard, simple homonyms among themselves. In this respect, they are
likely to cause confusion. However, and the formidable difficulties that I
would like to analyze begin here, however irreducible to each other they
remain, these three “logics” of substitution remain inseparable. And
they are “logics” that seem to defy logic, common sense.
Two of them, the first two, if you like, seem to concern the replace-
ment of some apparently replaceable, although non-equivalent, Xs—as
in, for example, when we replace this pharmakon that we call a toxic
drug with the other pharmakon that we call a medically controlled
medicine or “substitute product.” The other, the third or last, unless
it is the very first, seems bound, on the contrary, to the replacement of
what, or rather who, remains irreplaceable, although, in principle—and
on the contrary and in a quite different fashion—equivalent (as in what
we classically and traditionally, but I am suspicious of this language, call
a “human person”).
I will give names to these three a-logical “logics” of substitution
later by showing how, at once dissociable and indissociable, they both
require and exclude dissociation. This aporia calls for the most demand-
ing ethical, juridical, political, therapeutic responsibilities. It assigns
its place to the responsible decision, to the communal responsibility of
those who are associates and partners in the “treatment,” or in a shared
experience that I would hesitate to call “treatment” (and I will explain
why later); and it is this, this aporia, that I am going to discuss, that is,
cultivate a little, then, in a few news flashes, since time is short, begin
soberly and without much too intoxication to sniff around or chew over.
Now I begin.
Let’s take the following, if you don’t mind, as a plausible story, or
else as a fiction or a fable: ergo sum, I am here, but I am here a foreign
body, a grateful guest, certainly, but a foreign body who is experiencing
hospitality.
At the same time, this foreign body tries to think this experience of
hospitality, of conditional or unconditional hospitality, ready for any-
33
thing or almost anything. The foreign body wonders how and why a
culture of hospitality, or even of hospitalization, has always been preoc-
cupied with what is c alled—in a tradition and according to texts that I
will mention later—substitution.
So, what is substitution?
This foreign body, I am it, and I am following its trail [je le suis, et je
le suis à la trace]. I am nothing other than the foreign body determined
to follow the tracks and the ruses of a foreign body.
So you seem to hear the foreign body speak. It just thanked its hosts,
and he promises to do so again, but already he asks:
“What is a foreign body? Where does it come from? Where is its
place, where does it find its proper place?
“Does it have a proper place? Or else does it come to take the place of
another body that in this way it would come to replace?
“As the same or as another? Or does it come to occupy, like a stand-
in, a place in truth left vacant, an empty place? In both cases, its place-
ment would be a replacement.”
The foreign body continues, then, to ask: “So, what is a replacement?”
A voice from the audience responds to it: “A substitution. The foreign
body is a substitute.”
The foreign body protests. It repeats, thereupon, its initial question:
“certainly, but what, then, does ‘substitute,’ ‘substitution,’ ‘to substi-
tute’ mean? What is substitution? Where does it begin? Where does it
end? Does substitution replace the identical with the identical or only
with the similar? With the same or with the other? Analogy? Allegory?
Metonymy? Metaphor?
“What is this substitution of which people are talking so much,
debating about it endlessly in the public space of so-called public health
and in the noble corporation of those who, according to the laws of
hospitality of the hospitals, have the responsibility of treating, as one
says, drug addicts and those who deal with [traiter de] drug addiction?
Can we classify here the phenomena of substitution and the “substitute-
product” in the grand and old problematic of prosthesis or graft, which
has interested some of us philosophers for a long time and which was
revived, in the course of the last few decades, at an unprecedented pace,
by unheard-of techno-scientific developments?”
And the foreign body continues unabated: “I am not yet adding to
the list of these questions those that would not fail to multiply around
the word ‘product’ when we ask ourselves— in the same hospital
setting and in the same authorized discourse on the subject of public
health—what the current expression “substitute product” means (meth-
adone, Subutex, or buprenorphine, used in France, if I really understand
34 What Comes
it, in an experimental fashion, Temsegic, LAAM [levo- alpha acetyl

methadol], etc.).”
The word “product” indicates clearly, among other things, that this
aforementioned “substitute product” is not found in nature. A product
is, precisely, produced. We don’t find it as such in nature, it is an arti-
fact, a production, an invention, or a technical institution—in truth a
legitimate, industrial, thus patented institution—and it is put into legal
circulation and controlled in a certain market. And, as with everything
that is not in nature, not in physis, the aforementioned product belongs
to the order of everything that we distinguish from nature (physis),
namely techne, nomos, thesis, technique, law, convention, that is to say,
also the place left to simulacra, to fiction, fable, phantasm, interpreta-
tion, etc.
But if the drug is not in nature either—as in the past I tried to recall,
clarify, and draw some consequences from it (toxicity can be in nature,
not drugs1)—and if everything that is not natural keeps within itself some
substitutive dimension, and such is the definition of what is not natural,
and begins, then, by substituting itself for nature by entering irrevers-
ibly into a chain of substitutions and substitutions of substitutions, if
then the drug itself does not appear as such, from its origin, without
some substitutive displacement, then what is a “substitute product” that
would come, as it is believed, to be substituted for the drug?
What is this substitution that would be substituted for a substitution?
To reawaken a language and a logic of supplement of which I had once
made great use, I will translate my question in the following way: What
is this supplement that would come to be added—in order to compen-
sate for it, but as in making up for a lack—to another supplement?
While expressing, without undue delay, my profound gratitude from
the bottom of my heart for an invitation that honors me, I cannot not
confess before you a concern and a discomfort, when, in order to take
part in your work, I timidly prepare myself to confide in you some
modest, preliminary, above all uneasy and probably too general reflec-
tions on what can articulate this enigmatic concept of “substitution,” a
concept so elusive that it seems in advance to elude itself, evade itself,
split itself, or substitute itself for itself with the no less strange concept of
“foreign body.” This foreign body could take on at least three faces and
be represented by three bodies [instances], which all seem to give rise to
and appeal to forms of substitution.
1 Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Rhétorique de la drogue,” in Points de suspension (Paris:

Galilée, 1992); “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” in Points . . .: Interviews, 1974–1994
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 228–54.
35
What are these foreign bodies? Well, to be quick, let’s say:
1. the one we call or identify as the drug addict;

2. the product nicknamed “drug;”
3. the “product” nicknamed “substitute product.”
The first foreign body, the drug addict, the outcast pharmakos,
responds, it seems, to the question “who?” The other two— of the
pharmakon type, the supposedly toxic and noxious, poisoning, product,
the “drogue” (drug2 in English), and the substitute product which has
become a medical thing intended to cure, a medication with a therapeu-
tic aim (drug3 in English)—respond to the question “what?”
1. The first foreign body, which responds to the “who?” question,

could, then, be first and foremost the drugged, the drug addict
him- or herself, such that she or he is often named, treated (I do say
treated, still leaving this word to its equivocal charge), treated by a
society that tries to do what we always do with a supposed foreign
body: either ritually, sacrificially exclude it, like the pharmakos
outside the Greek city, or else on the contrary, unless this does not
come down to the same thing, reappropriate it, reintegrate it, reas-
similate it, rehabilitate it, reinsert it, etc.
2. The substance represented by what is called the drug itself, if such
a thing as the drug itself properly exists, which I do not believe: we
would be dealing, with the drug (poison or pharmakon, Plato would
say), with a foreign body that, not having its own existence, is in
advance engaged in a chain of substitution, even before being, sup-
posedly, relieved, replaced, or supplemented by what we believe can
be identified as a “substitute product.” I will say more about this
later.
3. Consequently, the third foreign body, the secondary foreign body,
the auxiliary body that comes in, to all appearances, to help the
other, replacing it in order to raise [relever] it, and ending, hopefully,
by relieving [relever] it of its duties. This could be the other foreign
body that we call a “substitute-product” (again a pharmakon, Plato
would say, but now in the sense of a remedy), a body as foreign to
the body proper as the “chemical straitjacket” about which Claude
Olievenstein once spoke (Claude Olievenstein to whom I want to
begin here by expressing my admiration, saluting the courage and
2 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.

3 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.
36 What Comes
lucidity, the revolutionary patience and impatience with which he

opened so many paths, opening and instituting the spaces for this
hospitality—
unconditional or not—about which I would like to
speak again later).
Claude Olievenstein spoke three years ago about the “chemical strait
jacket”4 in relation to substitute products. He then framed this remark
with several kinds of considerations which are of the greatest importance
to me in what follows, and I summarize them thus under four headings.
A. On the one hand, and firstly, there would be the risk that the simple
mechanical, even mercantile, recourse to substitute products makes us
run, outside what Olievenstein calls a “true therapeutic chain,” a chain
in which I will try later to recognize, for my part, in a manner that
is perhaps a little more worrisome, another chain or another logic of
substitution.
The simple technical, instrumental, automatic, pharmacological
administration of substitute products in places where people are not
concerned, Olievenstein says, “to care for but to contain drug addicts.”
I would like—allow me to say it again by way of a nticipation—to ask
myself with you all later what “care for” means in this case specifically
in opposition to “contain,” and especially in the spaces of what remains
in my opinion to be completely rethought and which we designate under
the statutory names—that are apparently full of common sense but that
are really obscure to my e yes—of “public health,” “health” tout court,
and “therapeutic injunction.”
If there is a substitution before the “substitute-product,” is the logic
of condemned repression (“chemical straitjacket,” “contain,” instead of
“care for,” etc.), is this risk of violence not already inscribed, itself, at
least as risk (but what, then, is the experience of risk?) in the challenge
of what we call “caring for” and above all of “caring for” in the public
space of public health?
What is care? Is it only the easing of suffering? Can we accredit a
simple opposition between suffering and pleasure or well-being? What is
the publicity of the public space and of public health?
What is a therapeutic injunction? I will return to this hive of ques-
tions, which remain or are becoming again completely new.
They become unprecedented again, as questions of the future (I am
noting this, since the future is on the agenda for this meeting), and
they are reawakened, these questions, even radically renewed by the
4 Claude Olievenstein, “Le toxicomane domestique,” Le Monde diplomatique,

November 22, 1997.
37
very becoming of drug addiction, by the techno-scientific, biochemical,

pharmacological transformations, by the transformations of the global
market, of international rights, of telecommunication, and of the public
space that conditions the change. No assurance, no “common sense”
guarantees us anything when it comes to thinking these things: “caring
for,” “therapeutic injunction,” pleasure, happiness, suffering, hardship,
res publica, public space, public health, health in general.
B. On the other hand, secondly, in the same text, Claude Olievenstein
also notes, still in the logic of the “chemical straitjacket,” that the substi-
tute product took over the topologies of exclusion in the buildings once
reserved, in the public space, to the mad, separating men from women.
As soon as the products of substitution emerge, we no longer need
spaces of inclusion or exclusion, nor topologically marked borders in
order to assure security control, because, Olievenstein says, “with prod-
ucts of substitution, there is no longer this type of problem since, at a
sufficient dose, they totally inhibit the libido.”
If a “sufficient dose” totally suppresses the libido, the expression
“sufficient dose” no longer designates only a quantitative evaluation.
At least, the economy of the dose is no longer objectified as a quantita-
tive calculus; it designates the place of a d ecision—in the hands of the
doctor or whoever is supposed to have at their disposal the elements
of the calculation—and thus, the place of an ethical and redoubtable
responsibility.
And regarding the place, or the substitute product that would succeed
in performing the exclusion, from within, if I could say, of excluding or
enclosing without a place of confinement, without an apartheid topol-
ogy, I recall that in Greek atopos is one of the words used to describe the
“mad.” The mad would be the without-place, that which has no place.
Well, today, in displacing this word a little, we could say that the
atopos, the mad without place, is the drug addict on a substitute product.
C. This is no doubt, thirdly, what forces Olievenstein to notice what
he holds, in fact, as a limit of the substitute products.
Just as when he spoke cautiously of “sufficient dosage,” he refers with
rigorous precaution to, I quote, “the great majority of drug addicts” in
order to trace a boundary between those drugs susceptible to substitu-
tion and those drugs irreducible to every possible substitution, irre-
placeable drugs, then, withdrawn from any suppleance or any possible
supplementarity.
We may always wonder if this boundary has an atemporal value, if it
will always exist, or if it is determined, conditioned by the present state
of research and by the chemical, pharmacological, bio-industrial devel-
opment of substitute products.
38 What Comes
In any case, Olievenstein emphasizes this limit, namely the boundary

between substitutable products and apparently unsubstitutable prod-
ucts, and in particular he inscribes his remark in a field of sociopolitical,
even economico-political, interpretation where the question is posed of
the minoritarian and the identitarian, of the identitarian claim of minor-
ity communities:
The treatment by methadone, a product of substitution, is presented to us as
a new method that is liberating for individuals and that is socially efficacious.
Now, this method is not new: it has been used in the United States for decades.
It has certainly avoided a certain danger but has not at all solved the problem
of drug addiction. The large majority [my emphasis] of drug addicts take prod-
ucts for which there is no substitution. Minority, especially black, communi-
ties know what the trap of social control is. They systematically take other
products like crack, which allow them to maintain an identitarian claim. Even
further, some, like runaway slaves [nègres marrons], are so bold as to resell
their methadone in order to procure heroin or mix heroin and methadone.
The “identitarian” worry is not, moreover, the object of a univo-

cal evaluation on Olievenstein’s part, who seems to understand it, if
not approve of it, in the end, when he designates—these are his last
remarks—the “identitarian drug addictions”. “Denying the complexity
of the problem can be momentarily efficacious; in the end, even the cows
go c razy . . . This system gives birth to other monsters and creates other
identitarian drug addictions.”
We find this limit of substitute products, as this recourse to the toxins
that remain inaccessible to every substitution, taken into account in
particular in the work of Marc Valleur (whom I would like to warmly
thank, as well as Michel Hautefeuille, for the invitation) published with
Pierre Angel, Denis Richard, and other colleagues, from Marmottan and
elsewhere on the Toxicomanies.5
After having noted the spectacular progress in substitute treatments in
France over the course of the last fifty years, the authors note that if this
treatment allows for “medicalizing” drug addicts (and this medicaliza-
tion, which the Henrion report6 [1995] also insists on, comprises all
the ambiguous effects of which we just spoke), if this treatment makes
it possible to count on (which does not mean obtain) a large number of
“benefits,” particularly lowering the risks tied to intravenous injections
(and the synchrony is henceforth well known and recognized between
the techniques of substitution and the development of AIDS and hepa-
5 Pierre Angel, Denis Richard, and Michel Valleur, Toxicomanies (Paris: Masson,
2000), 217ff.
6 Roger Henrion’s report of 1995 led among other things to an increased budget for
substitutes such as methadone.
39
titis B and C), if this treatment reduces acts of delinquency and the
symptoms of withdrawal, if it facilitates a social, professional, familial
reintegration, it cannot supplement certain still non-substitutable toxins;
and certain drug addicts, already under substitution treatment, continue
to consume cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, ecstasy, benzodiazepines, etc.
D. Fourthly, and finally, what Olievenstein puts forward when he
speaks of respecting an ethic, takes me to a second logic of substitution,
which is also another “chain” of substitution.
I am emphasizing the expression “therapeutic chain” in a passage
where Olievenstein asks that we reintegrate everything that the chemical
straitjacket (and thus the quasi physico-chemical substitution, the first
law of pharmacological substitution) will have removed from knowl-
edge: the relation to pleasure, social revolt, family reasons, individual
affect, in short, everything that must be taken into account in a compre-
hensive course of treatment.
Olievenstein complains, then, that the lack of m eans— insufficient
financial support from the powers responsible for public health, hence
for society—like the struggles between specialists and compartmental-
ized expertise, has put in jeopardy this good “therapeutic chain” fore-
seen by the “French system,” a system that, despite all the imperfections
of the law of 1970,7 seemed to make it possible to respect a certain
“ethic” (that’s Olievenstein’s word) through different elements of the
aforementioned “chain” (substitute products, but also complex clinical
attention to the singularity of the patient, their history, their phantas-
matics, their desire, their pleasure and their suffering, etc.).
What I would like to retain here from this diagnosis and this prescrip-
tion is the formula of transaction by which Olievenstein concludes on
the subject of substitution products. He says, indeed: “Let’s be clear,
it is not necessary to exclude substitution, but it must remain one tool
among others, anonymous and free.”
It is in responding to the imperative of this “it is necessary” or “it
is not necessary . . . but” (“it is not necessary to exclude substitution,
but it must remain a tool among others, anonymous and free”) that the
responsibility for the decision would go through choices that are each
time singular and unprecedented, choices that are tactical and strategic
(when, where, how, for whom, according to what dosage, at what pace?
etc.), each time in a therapeutic chain that takes into account and crosses
two logics: on the one hand, the first logic of substitution, what I just
called the quasi physico-chemical or quasi pharmacological substitution
7 [Translator’s note] The law of 1970 led to the treatment of drug addicts as both
ill and delinquent.
40 What Comes
(I will explain this “quasi” later), that of the “substitute product” with
its shifting resources taken in the constant progress of international
experimental research, in the domain of a market, in the state and leg-
islative constraints of public health; but on the other hand, inseparably,
the clinic, the vigilant and each time original attention to the singularity
of the patient, to their social and familial environment, to their history,
to their culture, to their way of speaking and their language, to their
phantasmatic organization, etc.
Although no one in the medical field or in the field of those responsible
for public health has ever dared to reject the necessity of crossing these
two approaches, these two approximations, it is necessary to recognize
the guiding role that Marmottan will have played in this approach. This
is too obvious.
It is, then, something else that I would like to suggest here on the
subject of the crossing or the difficult but indispensable intertwining of
these two approaches in this general therapeutic chain.
The point here is not to associate a logic of quasi physico-chemical
or quasi pharmacological substitution with a logic of non-substitution.
The clinical, existential, symbolic (call it what you want) approach—the
approach that, without ever being reduced to it, must surround the
administration of the substitute product and look after it—is also and
already a logic of substitution, another logic and the logic of another
substitution that we must take the responsibility for articulating, for
interlacing, for crossing with the first.
Before naming and analyzing this second logic of substitution in its
schema, as well as in its consequences, allow me, as though in a paren-
thesis, the time of a short pause, to confess a concern and a discomfort.
My indisputable incompetence as to the specific problems that you
all have a mission to treat in such grave conditions and that demand so
much courage and an acute sense of the responsibilities, of responsibili-
ties of all sorts, my limited knowledge of the past history and the devel-
opment of these problems, my lack of preparation, my training, my old
habits of all sorts: all of this makes me, here, already, a sort of foreign
body in your corporation, even a sort of substitute occupying the open
place of I don’t know who or what. (But in order to touch on in passing
what is probably the bottom of the question, how could someone say
to you: you know, I, ego cogito, ego sum, I, I who think, I who am, I
who am speaking to you, I am a substitute, I am an other, I come as
other?)
This foreigner does not want to look like a philosopher who would
come to ratiocinate in an abstract and speculative way about the
words, concepts, semantic questions, logic, or rhetoric where you are
41
ealing—in a concrete manner, and in the most dramatic urgency—with

d
the very thing that we call suffering.
But here we have it, what is the thing itself? And suffering itself? And
what one would like to oppose to it, pleasure itself?
Do we have the right to say that the entire hospital practice that sur-
rounds the use of substitute products has nothing to do with substitu-
tion? I don’t believe that at all. We know that the singularity of each
patient (whether or not they see you under the “therapeutic injunction”)
is woven, qua singularity, in his or her experience, in his or her history,
in his or her desire, in his or her phantasmatic organization, according
to the threads of a chain and a substitutive weft. There are here nothing
but driven [pulsionelles], psychical, imaginary, symbolic (whatever you
want to call it) substitutions as soon as you subtract them from the sup-
posed purely physico-chemical substitutions. In a rhetorical translation
that I will trust for the moment only for convenience’s sake, I would
say that the effect of drug addiction is inscribed in a network-chain
and weft—of metaphors, metonymies, condensations, displacements,
so many substitutive relays, so many supplements and replacements,
so many foreign bodies as well, without which we would understand
nothing about the drives, desires, pleasures, or sufferings of the drug
addict. Yet, as soon as a doctor (or whoever plays this role and substi-
tutes for the doctor) enters in a relation with this patient-addict, she or
he must assume in this regard two responsibilities and subscribe to two
axioms.
She or he must first, on the one hand, admit that she or he is already
dealing, on the side of the drug addict, with laws of substitution, which,
though they may not be those of the substitute products and of the
physico-chemical molecules, are no less, from one end to the other, real
substitutions that are articulated from the beginning, without delay, a
priori, with the logic of substitute products.
This is also why I spoke, on the subject of this latter, of the quasi
physico- chemical logic, because from the beginning, without delay,
a priori, the relation to physico- chemistry— in the taking of drugs
or substitute p roducts— is, let’s say, complicated, originally compli-
cated and overdetermined by the other regime of substitutions, the,
let’s say, psychical, symbolic, phantasmatic, most often unconscious
substitutions—therefore to be interpreted.
On the other hand, the doctor or their substitute, if they take into
account the double articulation of these two regimes of substitution,
knows that they find themselves, whether they want to or not, in a
transferential and countertransferential situation that is also of the order
of a substitutive relation that constitutes the most suitable response
42 What Comes
to the turbulent couple “quasi-physico-chemical-substitute-product/

psycho-metonymic-substitution.”
And I know that they can attempt to exercise their therapeutic respon-
sibility only in assuming this logic of transference, that is to say substitu-
tive logic, in the face of what I just called the turbulent couple (in which,
and the entire future of the science is called upon here, we will not cease
to re-evaluate the respective and articulable part of each of these two
members of the couple).
But if I am deliberately using the word transference, this is not because
the bond of love that— according to Freud, the transferential bond
constitutes—would seem to me to be the object of a clear, rigorous,
assured, responsible concept. I think exactly the opposite, and the thing
called “transference” remains to me as obscure as it is problematic.
But I want to use this word to two ends. On the one hand, the substi-
tutive nature of the transference is beyond any doubt. Wherever there
is transference, there is substitution without substitution product, even
if everywhere there is a substitute product a transferential machine is
already at work.
On the other hand, of course, with this word I want to fetch, sticking
to its historical roots, a little psychoanalytic soil.
Not that it is a matter for me, today, of dogmatically accrediting psy-
choanalysis, Freudian or post-Freudian, nor any of its theoretical state-
ments, its practical norms, or its institutional status.
I am calling psychoanalytic, here, in a minimal fashion, a clinical
awareness, which no one seems ready to oppose p ublicly—especially
when it is a question of framing in a considerate and prudent, multi-
lateral way the administration of the substitute p roducts—the clinical
attention to the singular psyche of the patient, and this is in a relation
that we could call, still in a minimal fashion, a tête-à-tête relation:
neither necessarily a psychotherapeutic face-to-face, nor necessarily a
session with a couch conforming to the rules and the time of the analytic
situation.
But a tête-à-tête, a dual relation of the transferential type. Because no
one, it seems to me, can deny a psychoanalytic specificity, let’s say at
least, an awareness of psychoanalytic culture in the clinic demanded by
all those who do not want to become substitute-product-administration
machines or normalizing-drug-addiction-by-controlling-it machines in
the service of security or smooth social functioning. In other words, a
psychanalytic-type concern, rigorous or not, cultivated or not, compe-
tent or not, must and cannot fail to indicate a hospital practice that is
directed at the second logic of substitution (quasi psycho-phantasmatico-
symbolico-metonymic, etc.—always to be interpreted) and that tries to
43
articulate it with the first, that of the quasi physico-chemical, substitute

products.
In other words, on the side of the transference or on the side of the
psychical tissue of the patient, the second logic of substitution must,
on the one hand, welcome at least the principle of a certain psychoana-
lytic revolution and, on the other hand, open itself to the grand and old
but new question—I was going to say mind and body question, you have
translated and, thus, substituted—the grand and old q uestion—newer
than ever in light of the unprecedented progress of bio-neuro-psychical
technoscience— into the relation between the organic, the physico-
chemical (always impure) and psychical (always impure).
Before telling you the two reasons for which, in such a summary, prin-
cipal and general fashion, I name psychoanalysis at this point, I am once
again making use of a remark from Professor Olievenstein.
I came upon this remark with even more pleasure and narcissistic
jubilation since I had myself written, among other essays on psychoana-
lytic things, for the occasion of an intervention in a conference, a text
entitled: “Let Us Not Forget Psychoanalysis.”8
I expounded there, a few years ago, the reasons to resist the wave of
anti-psychoanalytic reactions, even the recession or the resignation of
psychoanalysis, which seems, which still seems, to mark our time.
Above all, “don’t forget psychoanalysis,” I wrote then.
Now what do we read in Olievenstein’s preface to the book on drug
addiction, which I just cited? This, the don’t-forget, the non-amnesia, in
a phrase, after a general description of the state of the places, problems,
and tasks to come: “Lastly, psychoanalysis itself is not forgotten, resum-
ing the d ebate—which is still taking p lace—over what belongs to the
structure and what does not belong to it.” (I underline the allusion to the
non-omission of psychoanalysis.)
I have thus called it, summarily, the “psychoanalytic” principle and
reduced it to its minimal demand, for two reasons in our context.
These reasons eminently concern the future, since it is inscribed in the
agenda of our meeting.
The res publica—I don’t dare say the r epublic—is at stake twice in the
concepts of “public health,” on the one hand, and of “therapeutics,” on
the other, in the motif of the “therapeutic injunction” according to the
law of 1970.
The first reason, then, the concept of public health.
8 [Translator’s Note] Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis,”

trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford Literary Review 12, no. 1/2
(1990), 3–7.
44 What Comes
As soon as, and insofar as, a psychoanalytic tête-à-tête starts up in the

experience of the first two substitutions of which we just spoke, well,
we are no longer in the space of public health, its laws, its authority, its
norms, and its rules.
Even if the tête-à-tête takes place in a public hospital, it cuts out an
enclave there that is, in principle and by right, impenetrable.
It is not a question here simply of the professional secret to which the
doctors are held or which protects the doctors even when they work in
a public service.
No, without being secret or simply private, the analytic situation,
in its minimal premises, remains and must remain indifferent to any
concern for public health, indeed—but I will come to this in a moment,
and the thing is as difficult as it is c ontested—indifferent to every strictly
therapeutic concern, indifferent to the question of a certain normality
that we call “health” in general, even before its specification as “public
health.”
When I say “public health,” I am not thinking first only of the most
debatable, although not illegitimate, aims of security protection, even of
social security, of normalization, of rehabilitation, about which I know
a lot of you worry.
No, I am thinking of all the most vital, indeed the most generous,
indeed the most noble, responsibilities of public health.
One can, in principle, allow for a rigorous psychoanalytic demand
only by excluding oneself from every space of “public health,” indeed
of every public space in general, or even again of every concern or sup-
posed knowledge on the subject of health in general.
It is on the often undecidable and always threatened border of this
exception that the most serious decisions, I imagine, call for the taking
of unheard-of responsibility. This is true, it seems to me, for the doctors
specialized in drug addiction inside public hospitals, at Marmottan or
elsewhere, but it also goes for all the psychiatrists and even for all pro-
fessional psychoanalysts who work in association with the institutions
tied, according to one statute or another, to what we call public health,
to the State, or even to civil society.
We must go even further: the responsibility called for by a situation
of a psychoanalytic type breathes only at the level where the already
constituted social bond is suspended, if not interrupted.
This responsibility always concerns the joint between the two already
recognized substitutions, between soul and body, if I may say, and it is
all the more alive, but necessary and terrifying, because of the fact that
it must advance without prior norms, without general rules, without
assured values, without a recognized or statutory third party in the
45
transferential tête-à-tête (even if a phantasmatic third party is at play);

and I would even go so far as to say without knowledge.
One needs to know, of course, one needs to have knowledge of the
norms, rules, third parties, etc., but the moment of the responsible
decision, if there is one, presupposes a leap beyond all assurances that,
alone, would transform the decision into a program.
Where the knowledge, the knowledge of norms, dictates a decision,
there is no longer responsibility, nor even a tête-à-tête.
The responsibility must, then, at every moment invent its own norms
and its strategy, at its own risk and peril, within a unique and perilous
situation that is itself born of a risk-taking, of a putting into play, even
of a wager.
This responsible decision is all the more formidable, in truth nerve-
wracking, since it must not only be invented, inaugurate its norms at
every moment in the solitude of the tête-à-tête or in the body-to-body
[corps-à-corps], a soul- to-soul [âme-à-âme], but the “who” (I don’t
mean the subject or person, or ego, or conscience, or body, or soul, or
even “free power” for reasons that I imagine are obvious and that in any
case I don’t have the time to demonstrate), the “who” in question is not
assured of its identity or of its ipseity, involved as it is in a substitution
machine and at least in a transferential situation; and above all it does
not know before whom they assume such a responsibility in the dark,
the other “who” of the tête-à-tête also still to come and inscribed in the
same game of transferential substitution as they are; they do not know
either before whom nor until when, because this psychoanalytic experi-
ence is not, it must not be, a moment, the moment of a dialectical whole,
in the banal sense or in the Hegelian sense, a simple moment in a general
process of the truth.
Its time is heterogeneous to general time, it can interrupt the ordinary
course of history (personal or social), and thus be revolutionary or
remain, qua moment, interminable.
I am not saying that such a responsible decision is, in all purity,
strictly speaking, possible.
I am saying that, if it is to take place, as responsible decision, and thus
opening up to an ethical experience of the ethical, it is at this cost.
And this cost is nothing other, to begin with, than the—of course
dangerous—suspension of every imperative of public health.
I add simply, so that my remarks do not seem too worrisome or pro-
vocative, that this suspension of every given concept of public health is
also the condition for the least critical or genealogical analysis of the
history of this concept and of its present interpretation at such and such
a moment of such and such a nation-state, in Europe or elsewhere.
46 What Comes
To take only one example, we could not even envisage the present
legislation, the law of 1970 or other analogous provisions, and above
all their transformation, their improvement, that many of you seem
to want, without a critical and genealogical analysis of the concept of
public health (and thus of law) today held to be normal, normative,
prescriptive.
This history is a history, it is not natural, it never has been, it is sub-
mitted more than ever to great turbulences and if some, for example,
legislative transformations are necessary to affect it—no one doubts
that—if progress is possible, it is only insofar as one does not dogmati-
cally validate such and such a configuration of public health.
The law of 1970, to cite it alone, somewhat modified, in the domain
that interests us here, the very structure and space of so-called public
health.
This suspension of norms and laws of public health is not necessarily
depoliticizing.
It can even start a repoliticization, a new thinking or new interpreta-
tion of the political, but of course on the condition of deconstructing
both the given concept of the “public,” of the “res publica,” of the pub-
licity of public health, indeed health in general, and what therein binds,
at a given moment, but not forever, our political experience.
When we take it in perspective, in the full range of its international,
State, and meta-State forces, according to all the logics of substitution
that go from the production, the trafficking, the consumption, from
the legal administration of the substitute product, all along the thera-
peutics of which we are speaking, until its psychoanalytic moment or
enclave, well, the question of drug addiction could very well be one of
the most sensitive spots today for this historical reinterpretation of the
political.
Second reason, the concept of the therapeutic in the horizon of the
“therapeutic injunction.” I cannot venture here into the thick and dense
forest of this question that is at once judicial and health-related, where
it is much more as though the trees are constantly encroaching, like in
Macbeth. Everyone agrees on the necessity to look again at the law of
1970 in its entirety, whatever progress it has ambiguously marked.
As to the “1970 therapeutic injunction model,” it “seems really to
have aged,” Angel, Richard and Valleur note, after having recalled that
the prescription for the obligation of care (pronounced by an examining
magistrate, a juvenile court judge, or a judging jurisdiction) was practi-
cally not applied until 1987 and even then only in an uneven, insufficient
fashion, particularly because of a lack of resources, even from 1995
when a memorandum encouraged the extension of this measure.
47
To stick to the intentional principle of it alone, to the sole “idea,” to

the spirit, if you prefer, of the aforementioned “therapeutic injunction,”
I will situate only a few questions, before hurrying, because of time,
toward a third or, just as well, a first and last logic or interpretation of
substitution.
Despite all the imperfections of this juridical apparatus, despite what
in it calls for so many amendments of it, the “therapeutic injunction”
opens in any case a space that is, in principle, liberated from repressive
and judicial pressure in general. Through anonymous and free care,
the doctor and the drug addict can freely “work,” if we may say so,
together. They can, in principle, both see to it that—to use the language
that I am trying to formalize—the substitution number 2 (quasi psycho-
symbolic or phantasmatic, which includes the irreducible enclave of
psychoanalysis and of the transferential substitution) is recognized as
already at work in the substitution number 1.
They can agree to recognize that the “substitute products” are already
and must be reinscribed in broader process of substitution (socio-
symbolic, phantasmatic, transferential) as was already, from the begin-
ning, if I can say, the addictive recourse to the drug.
But the contract, the processes, the work carried out in the space of
the therapeutic injunction, all along the chain, continue to bind, in a
duration itself constrained, both the drug addict and the doctor to the
norms of health and of public health. And this is where we must take
into account two problems or two equations with two unknowns.
Let us consider indeed the therapeutic injunction from the other side,
if I may say, no longer from the side of the legislative and judicial appa-
ratus of 1970 or the provision of justice that binds the drug addict, but
from the side of the promise or the profession of faith of the medical
professional which enjoins curing before any other consideration.
Well, in the time and in the space of what I call the psychoanalytic and
transferential enclave, not only the imperative to treat, right where we
speak of cure, is not the object of ethical consensus for the psychoana-
lytic community, if something like that exists.
There is no talk of treatment, the words “health” and “normality”
have no regulatory status there. And above a ll—this is the double point
I would like to emphasize while speeding things u p—even if we wanted
still to talk about a cure, treatment, and health, on the one hand, it
would be a psychoanalytic duty to suspend every essential line between
the aforementioned cure and any preoccupation, statutory or not, about
public health; on the other hand, to treat would not mean, in a univo-
cal fashion, easing suffering, or putting an end to it, as I have read here
and there in texts by psychiatrists legitimately preoccupied with the
48 What Comes
s pecificity of their mission of care (and not as auxiliaries or controllers

of the social order).
Every doctor and the majority of patients know that “being cured”
does not mean the end of suffering.
It is sometimes the opposite. If psychoanalysis has taught us
something—and something that is nowhere better confirmed in a more
acute, more specific fashion than by the experience of drug addiction
and of every addiction in general (sex, tobacco, alcohol, etc.), just as
from the experience of every compulsion—it has taught us that the
relation between suffering and non-suffering, suffering and pleasure or
suffering and euphoria, etc., is not decidable as a relation of opposition
and exclusion.
There can be pleasure in suffering, or even in making (or being made)
or leaving (being left) to suffer, etc. And it is often of a certain pleasure
that it is a question of “being cured.” All that is all too well known.
It is thus not certain, from this psychoanalytic and transferential
enclave of substitution, that there be a curing, and that that be the cat-
egorical imperative, neither that treating consist in easing suffering or
re-establishing a norm of health, nor that health in general be homoge-
neous with public health.
I am not saying that we must reassure ourselves with a reverse certi-
tude, but it is only in this undecidability that the most serious responsi-
bilities can be taken.
They are to be taken by definition—because the essence of responsibil-
ity and of the decision is at s take—without prior and available norms.
Without any norms that are not to be invented, reinvented in each sin-
gular situation at the unstable and porous limit between public, statu-
tory, and even State missions and duties without any professional status,
without any guardrail, without any general rule.
Such a responsibility always implying—as I have tried to demon-
strate e lsewhere—that the decision is always the decision of the other,
of the other for me or the other in me, it must be shared without sym-
metry, in a sense of sharing that I do not have the time to get into, no
more than I would have the time to say more than a few words on the
subject of the third or first logic of substitution of which I have not yet
spoken.
It is about a certain bond between hospitality and hospitalization.
One text defines the Marmottan hospital as, I quote, a “place of uncon-
ditional welcome.”9
9 Denis Richard and Jean-Louis Senon, Dictionnaire des drogues, des toxicomanies,
et des dépendances, preface by Bernard Kouchner (Paris: Larousse, 1999).
49
The expression “unconditional welcome” returns more than once in

the same presentation.
I will avoid overdoing an objection that would consist in holding the
aforementioned unconditionality to be incompatible with the contract
which the same text recognizes. It is indeed a question there of a
relation that is intersubjective and structured by a contract, tacit or explicit,

tying the “clients” to the institution: according to its modalities the nursing
staff commit to respecting volunteer status and anonymity, and the clients
commit to not using drugs inside the establishment and not engaging in vio-
lence against another or themselves.
Even if unconditional hospitality is incompatible with the contract, there

is undeniably in the foundation of Marmottan a regulative idea, more
precisely a principle of urgency, of unconditional hospitality. Even if it
remains de facto impossible, the im-possible.
And the most serious, the most critical, the most risky, responsibil-
ity, here again, concerns the better or least bad economy of transaction
between unconditionally and contractual norms, that is, conditionality.
I wanted only to recall briefly that the word and concept of substitu-
tion (it is the third or first logic of substitution, then) were put to work
by thinkers (Christian like Massignon, Jewish like Levinas) to define
unconditional hospitality.
Which, in an Abrahamic tradition (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic),
would have the calling of welcoming the other by becoming responsi-
ble for them, not by identifying with them, not in replacing them, but
in becoming their guest or their hostage (that’s Levinas’s word) to the
point of giving up one’s room for them: the other is at home in my
home, I am in their home in letting them come before me in my home.
I am, in the hospital of this hospitality, the guest of the guest [l’hôte de
l’hôte].
If I had the time to deploy the premises and the consequences of this
other way of thinking substitution—which could no doubt free itself
from its context of positive Abrahamic r eligion—I would maintain that
it is already secretly at work, without being reduced to this, but inter-
weaving with it, from the threshold of substitutions 1 and 2. It is already
tacitly at work in the idea of the hospital and the therapeutic chain,
including in its psychoanalytic and transferential enclave.
I will go even so far as to say that it is already at work, sacrificial or
not, as the most risky and most playful experience of the other, from
the threshold of the substitute products, and even from the threshold of
addictive compulsion, whether threatened, threatening, risky, joyous, or
wagering.
50 What Comes
To conclude telegraphically, here would stand, before law and before

the political, before the agencies of health and public health, before the
professional statutes of the medical body, b efore—but of course in view
of what is thus preceded—the ethical question would rise rather than
take hold, older than any norm and any positive law, than any legisla-
tive provision, older even than what we call in general the ethical as set
of norms, rules, and general laws. Beyond what Kierkegaard called the
ethical stage of the generality of the law. There would rise the always
singular question of ethical singularity: but always from one substitu-
tion to the other, of one for other, between these three figures of sub-
stitution, in the decision to be taken without waiting in a situation that
must be undecidable for there to be a responsible decision worthy of
the n ame—and always in urgency, for lack of time. There is ethics, as
always, like now, when there is urgency (you know this urgency, better
than anyone), when time lacks, when time is lacking, when we say to
ourselves, without being able to do anything about it: time is wanting, it
is lacking, it would take time, more time.
We no longer have the time to give ourselves time.
Chapter 3
Idioms, Nationalities, Deconstructions:

Encounter with Jacques Derrida in
Rabat (1998)
“Fidélité à plus d’un” was originally published in Idiomes, nation-

alités, déconstruction: Rencontre de Rabat avec Jacques Derrida (Paris:
Intersignes / Casablanca: Editions Toubkal, 1998), 221–65.1
A gathering of eight intellectuals of the Arab world around Derrida’s
work in Rabat, Morocco in April 1996.
I. Uns, the Third Party Who Accompanies Me, and

Unsocial Sociability (“being-with” Muslims)
First of all, I would like to say a warm and simple thank you for having
included me in your work here. What an opportunity this is, more than
just one [plus d’une chance], and I will likely not be at all equal to the
task.
You began in the plural, if I may put it like that. We started out from
more than one place and that was good.
“Deconstruction,” if there is any, and even if it remains the ordeal of
the impossible, is not one deconstruction. “If there is any,” as I think it
is always necessary to say, and according to the irreducible modality of
the “perhaps,” of the “possible, impossible perhaps,” there is more than
one of them and it speaks more than one language. By vocation.
From the beginning it was clear that “deconstructions” had to be said
in the plural. Each moment of this experience is tied to figures of sin-
gularity. Figures of the idiom in particular. Very quickly, naturally, the
Translated by Adam Rosenthal.

1 [French edition editors’ note] We reproduce here, literally, on the basis of the
transcription of the recording, the interventions improvised by Jacques Derrida after
each paper, at the beginning of the discussion sessions. We have simply grouped
them together. The subtitles were proposed after the fact by Jacques Derrida himself.
52 What Comes
question of deconstructions got involved around what we enigmatically

call the “idiom,” the stakes of the idiom—which is not to be confused
simply with language. At stake, then, were the enigmas of translation,
the paradoxes of the signature.
These generalities aside, everyone undergoes their experiences and
passions on the basis of the limits, fields, roots, and uprootings of their
“own idiom.” Now it happens [il se trouve], at a point where I am not
even sure that I can say that I find myself [je me trouve moi-même] (here
we have a French idiomatic expression, se trouver, a lucky find [trou-
vaille] “of genius” in the language, about which I’m never sure whether,
where, and how it gets translated), it happens, then, that I allowed
myself—though not so very a ctively—to be encircled, if I can say that,
within a “Franco- monolingual culture,” but in an “Arabo- Muslim”
Maghreb milieu, as is sometimes audaciously said in Algeria. Inhabiting
what I nicknamed the “monolingualism of the other,” I always felt it as
a painful and enticing deprivation not to be able to have direct access to
the idioms of which Hachem Foda has given us—and it was a gift—an
extraordinary illustration, in the sense in which we speak of a “defense
and illustration of a language.”2 Such a defense and illustration puts to
work as well as analyzes, explores, interrogates, and gives one a lot to
think about. Moreover, Hachem Foda’s demonstration unfolded along
the lines of a double writing in accordance with the productive alliance
and mutual provocation of Arabic and French.
Thanks to you and, first of all wishing to give thanks for your hospi-
tality, I came here in the first place, let me recall once more, to listen. I
would like to try to broach, still thanks to you, these problematics that
are so inextricably linked to the idiom. I came above all in order to hear
today what seems to me, for obvious reasons, more necessary to hear
today than ever. Right away it was clear to me, as it was presumably to
you as well, that, in improvising after each presentation, I could never
claim to respond in a satisfactory way. If I have agreed to this presump-
tuous situation, it is in order to expose myself to your critical discourses,
to surrender myself to them, unarmed, with my questions and the limits
of my competence, that is, in all naivety.
I was first of all overwhelmed with admiration when I heard Hachem
Foda speak. I must say that this could become a habit for me each time
I hear him, as I have been doing for many years now in Paris, were it
not each time unusual and new. This habit is revived each time. The
2 [Translator’s note] Derrida is here referring to Joachim du Bellay’s La défense et

illustration de la langue française (1549).
Idioms, Nationalities, Deconstructions (1998)
53
extraordinary meditation through which he led us was also overseen by

the acute vigilance of a flawless analytical reading.
I inscribe the remarks that I would have wanted to risk putting
forward h ere—as marginal and brief as they remain—within the most
general perspective.
Before us lies the task of interpreting the resources of undecidability,
an undecidability that is always, by definition, determinable and thus in
the process of being determined. These are the resources put to work by
the analyses of the uns—between the social bond [lien] and social disso-
lution [déliaison], where the bond is thought rather as dissolution, famil-
iarity as strangeness, proximity of the neighbor as solitude, between the
human and the divine, the finite and the infinite, etc. To quote from
Foda’s superb [French] translation: “in the uns without companions
(jamâ’a),” we are “in a company without company or companion;” “to
have God as companion is to have company without companions, it is
to be with no one, in no one’s company,” in the company perhaps, one
might say with Blanchot, of “the one who did not accompany me.” And
who is, in their very absence, beyond a determination, someone, This
one.
But this other writing that is tied, in Arabic as much as in French,
to the chances of the two idioms—is it translatable? Does it resist the
passage between the two languages? Is it re-translatable, in return, upon
returning home, where it “returns home” only for having “remained”
there, between the known and the unknown, only because it was first as
if expatriated from it on the inside? Above all, is it translatable into two
+ n languages? And what then would such a translation mean?
The supplementary and abyssal paradox is that this logic of solitary
accompaniment, this isolation or withdrawal into being-with, is also
the destiny of translation. These propositions wanting translation [en
mal de traduction] are propositions that concern translation itself.
There is no translatological metalanguage that is not subjected, as an
idiom, once again, to the drama it claims to formalize or translate in its
turn. One never speaks of translation in a universal language, outside a
(untranslatable—to be translated) natural language.
Each word, each bit of word, each root stem or radical awakens all
sorts of associations in us. What credit should they be granted? What
interest? Analogous references, structures, and laws oblige us to ask
ourselves: what are we to make of what is engendered in such a striking
manner in the economy of phrases that put to work a set of semantic
notes around the ’ns (uns, ânasa, anis, anisa bi, mu’nis, etc.)? What are
we to make of what spreads in this way throughout the system of a
general economy? How are we to interpret the singular event of these
54 What Comes
phrases, which are so many “poems,” and which are indistinguishable

from the very unfolding of language? Can we find economic equiva-
lences for these poematic occurrences in other languages, cultures,
logico-semantic systems?
My temptation—today as always, no doubt—would dictate to me
two fidelities: to respect the untranslatable irreducibility of the idiom,
of course, but, at the same time to apprehend this untranslatability
otherwise. This untranslatability would no longer be a hermetic limit
or the impenetrable opacity of a screen, but quite to the contrary an
incitement to translation—already a commitment to translate within
the experience of the untranslatable as such. To apprehend the untrans-
latable, to apprehend it as such, is to read, to write, in the strong sense
of the word, of course; it is to wrestle [c’est le corps-à-corps] with the
idiom; but it is therefore already an ordeal, the first ordeal of the call
to translate. Right from the start, the “poem” is inscribed within a
network of possible translations. Let us here call “poem” the unique-
ness of the signature, the occurrence, the event of a given discursive
performance where meaning can no longer be separated from a phrase,
a lexicon, and a grammar. With this, I am not opposing the translat-
able to the untranslatable. Out of “sacred” respect for the idiom,3 I am
always searching for a universal political chance, a universality that
does not crush the idiom. Is that possible? This could be possible only
if one already grants to the idiom what you recalled apropos of being-
with. The idiom is never the proper or the self-identity of the proper; it
is already different from itself, it is only in difference. It inscribes a gap
within itself. This gap conditions the idiom’s irreducible economy in a
language while simultaneously announcing, without delay, because of
the gap, the work of translatability. Already within a single language.
What was said of social binding or unbinding would then be said of the
idiom itself.
Having thus broached this huge question of the social bond, would
we not be tempted to recall an obvious but difficult fact? Namely that it
cannot be a matter of simply opposing the social bond to social dissolu-
tion. The social bond implies, it even requires interruption. The phrases,
descriptions, situations, or semantic roots happen to be distributed in
3 I did not mean by this that there is first the possibility of this respect, some religion
in general coming here to take the idiom as one of its exemplary themes or objects.
This experience of the idiom, this desire for an idiom to be saved, this salvation
[salut] of an idiom to be kept untouched, immune, sacrosanct, is the very origin
of religion. Allow me to refer here to “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of
‘Religion’ within the Limits of Reason,” in Acts of Religion.
55
such a manner that the very meaning of sociability as being-with finds

itself deconstructed. Deconstructions, there are, in the plural, once the
social bond is affirmed only in and through dissolution. What do people
so often reproach deconstruction (in the singular) for? For being nihil-
istic and relativistic, for dissolving the social bond, for undermining
meaning, for being dissociation at work, a work of ruin, in the socius.
This is what is felt to be a threat in politics, in institutions, in the univer-
sity. Deconstruction, it is charged, comes along to threaten the security
of being-at-home, of being with oneself, but it does so first of all, as Foda
has shown so well, because it is operating already in the contradiction
that is at work “in” the meaning of certain words, in the meaning of
what it would be too hasty to call, in accordance with an apparent gene-
alogy that would find its limits here, primal words. The contradiction is
neither verbal nor conceptual in the speculative sense of the word. If it
is in the concept, if it is the concept, this would be in the sense in which
the concept, beyond representation, is actuality itself. I am well aware
that this is a Hegelian proposition, but one that must be withdrawn
from speculative dialectics because the “contradiction” we’re speaking
of is a radical one, so radical that it founds and exceeds all dialectics. It
withdraws from every dialectical horizon just when it seems to unfold
or arrest that horizon. What at first blush indeed looks like a logical,
semantic, or dialectical contradiction, is more and other than that: older
or younger than all dialectics.
The transcriptions of uns are striking. A swarm of homonyms stirs
up graphic and acoustic forms, via masks and simulacra, among more
than just one language: the [French] “ones” [uns], the [German] “us”
[uns] (the we), etc. How could one not be fascinated by the appar-
ently ludic associations of these homonyms? There is also the Un,
however one chooses to pronounce it. Think of the ungraspable play,
in German, of the Un- in Unheimlichkeit. It qualifies what is heimlich
(interior, close by, familiar, domestic, intimate, etc.) but also, and at
the same time, its opposite. It goes without saying that Hachem Foda’s
discourse is a treatise on what cannot be translated in the German
word Unheimlichkeit, in what German, but also in what someone or
other [les uns et les autres], a Freud or a Heidegger for example, lets
us hear in it. We have all these opposites in German: proximity as
distance, familiarity as foreignness, the neighbor as the other or the
stranger, etc.
What is given as a remarkable, economic chance within an Arabic
semantic field right away recalls a great many analogous structures, be
they linguistic or social. I mentioned Blanchot’s “the one who did not
accompany me.” One could also think of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (in the
56 What Comes
friendly duel, only a third party can keep us safe from the abyss),4 of all
the situations where what was at first described as a double scene turns
out to be a single one, one and the same scene: that of intimate sociabil-
ity, the gathering of friends or relatives, the proximity even of neighbors
[prochains] that seemed to be opposed to the ways of the anchorite or
the distancing of the recluse who abandons the world. But he abandons
it in view of the uns. If separation or interruption takes place in the
second scene in view of the uns, this means that the scenes aren’t two
scenes but are the same experience, under the same law and according
to the same desire. If we agree to think that this is the same scene with
different figures, that it is the same uns, a first question perhaps arises:
can one oppose heaven to earth within the sameness of this uns that is
distributed in this manner? Can one distinguish between the human and
the divine? In other words, between the human socius and the relation
to God?
I would be tempted at first to say “no”—and I really am calling this
a temptation. Let’s take again the example of Moses: he asks God to
show Himself (“show me your glory”). God refuses visibility. This
scene can be taken as the paradigm of every relation to the other, what-
ever it may be, human or divine. Isn’t having a relation to the other as
other, in separation or interruption, to have a care for [tenir à] another,
to tend, to tense oneself toward them, where the other can show itself
only in not showing itself? The relation to alterity in general, this
experience of an invisibility in the visible, where non-phenomenality is
necessary, is something like a self-interruption by the phenomenology
of Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations, or in another way by that of
Levinas throughout his entire work. The relation to the alter ego can
never be an immediate intuition or an originary perception. One has
no access to the here and now of the other, on the other side, to the
zero-point of this other origin of the w orld—and this is the condition
of the experience of the other as other. This primary unbinding at the
heart of the social bond, as the very condition of the social bond, has
first of all to do with the alterity of the other: the other presents itself
as other only by never presenting itself as such, other as other. In other
4 Cf. “‘One is always one too many around me’—thus speaks the hermit. ‘Always
once one—in the long run that makes two!’ I and Me are always too earnestly in
conversation with one another: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?
For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third person is the cork that
prevents the conversation of the other two from sinking to the depths” (Thus Spake
Zarathustra). On this passage and these themes, cf. Politics of Friendship, tr. George
Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 277 and passim.
57
words, the way in which the other presents itself consists in not pre-
senting itself. Isn’t this the law of the relation to the other, whatever
it may be, X, animal, God, or man? That’s one of the questions to ask
of Levinas when he speaks of the Wholly Other or the Infinitely Other.
Is he speaking of God or the other in general? Isn’t he installed in the
analogy between Moses’ relation to God and man’s relation to man, or
even of every other to every other, to the wholly other of every other
[au tout autre de tout autre]?
If this question is meaningless, if indeed it is impossible to distinguish
between these two instances or scenes, then there would be a sort of
structural and fundamental necessity of the uns before every anthropo-
theology; this necessity would be as valid for God as for man. The expe-
rience of the uns would happen according to the law of this law, anterior
to God and anterior to man, if I can put it like that. A certain mourning
would also be originary to this experience: the other does not present
itself, it absents itself precisely where and even as it presents itself: it is
departed. No sooner do I see it coming than I am already weeping over
its absence, bewailing-desiring-apprehending its departure: there I am
saying “good-bye” [“adieu”] to it already, “good-bye, you’re aban-
doning me, why have you abandoned me, come back, but you aren’t
coming back, you can’t come back [revenir], you revenant, but above all
don’t come back if you are to remain my other [autre] or my host/guest
[hôte],” etc. The mystical plenitude of kenosis; the fullness of the void.
All these contradictory modes of address are analogous and the law that
governs them remains equally irreducible. Isn’t this the “uns,” the “uns
with God?,” the Go(o)d-bye [l’à-Dieu] of the Uns with God?
Speech given over to madness: restraint [la retenue] becomes its oppo-
site; it proceeds from and also accedes to its opposite—even before being
what it is. I tried to broach this logic in “Faith and Knowledge.” Isn’t
restraint the origin and essence of the religious (religio) in its two sup-
posed senses and filiations: the bond but also the scruple that unbinds
by keeping at a distance, the suspension, abstention, modesty, reserve,
respect, secrecy, mystery, the mystical, separation, sanctity, sacredness,
immunity, holiness [in English in original], Heiligkeit? Whence the
unheimlich laughter with God and the greatest familiarity in the head-
to-head or face-to-face with the transcendent.
Is there then a place for the third party? An unassailable place? For
the terstis, the third party and the witness? If Levinas, for instance, con-
siders the duel of the face-to-face with the face [visage], in the infinite
transcendence of the other, to be the origin of both the ethical and the
religious, he must also answer for the agency of the third party. The
latter is both unavoidable and immediate. It does not wait for or befall
58 What Comes
a dual that supposedly precedes it.5 It inhabits and pervades the dual in
its very epiphany. Now, as appearance of the third party, recourse to the
witness opens up the field of justice and politics for Levinas. Better still,
we find there the birth of the question, where it is not simply a case of
my posing it—which I also do as a philosopher—but where I find myself
“in question,” put in question. The third party is the “birth of the ques-
tion,” says Levinas. Shouldn’t we pursue our meditation on the uns in
this direction? Towards its ethical, political, and juridical dimensions?
Foda in fact underscores this: “There is no way for us to be completely
alone with this third party, in all the senses of the word ‘with’.” And he
quotes the expression from Murûj adh- dharab [The Meadows of Gold]:
“We are in need of a third person who could make being-together, the
mu’âchara, agreeable.” Are we not here in the halls of justice, of a justice
that appeals both to the social bond and to social dissolution? To the
respect for the unique as well as to universal law? To what Levinas, as
well as Massignon (in what he designates as “prayer on the Islamico-
Christian front”) calls the substitution (Badaliya) of the unique, the
spirit of fraternal substitution,6 the replacement of the irreplaceable
that remains irreplaceable? Apropos this substitution, the possibility of
its impossibility, I was struck by the anchorite’s answer to Dhû l-Nûn
before dying: “Love your Lord and do not ask for any substitute [badîl]
for this love.”
At one point Hachem Foda referred, I think, to a recommendation he
called Islamic—one that came, paradoxically, from someone who cuts
himself off. It’s at the moment of separation that the following is said:
“Don’t cut yourself off from the community of Muslims [jamâ’a], be
with the neighbor as a Muslim. One must be with Muslims in order to
be Muslim,” etc.
If I understood correctly, we were in the process of analyzing lin-
guistic, discursive, or pragmatic phenomena, situations interpreted on
the basis of narratives and poems, without Arabic, the language or
culture, yet having been defined as Arabo-Muslim. Islam would have
been named solely on the basis of the aforementioned recommendation.
Is this significant or not? Might we conclude from this that many of
the elements analyzed up to this point derive from cultural and linguis-
5 I tried to broach these texts and issues in “A Word of Welcome” in Adieu to

Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
6 Cf. for example, Louis Massignon, L’hospitalité sacrée (Nouvelle Cité, 1987),
281 and passim. This motif of substitution, which is at the center of Massignon’s
and Levinas’s thinking, finds one of its traditions (at least in terms of Massignon’s
inheritance) in Christian mysticism. It is, among others, in Huysmans’s texts that
Massignon first received it as a revelation, it seems.
59
tic idioms tied to Arabic but not to Islam? Or is the weld between the
two irreducible? And naturally we think of a barely delimitable prob-
lematic, that of the proximity of the neighbor and of the neighbor as
“brother” or of cosmopolitical universality, which found in Saint Paul
one of its first literary formulations. There is here a whole set of politi-
cal questions—and Foda forcefully engaged with them. If this injunction
“Being-with-Muslims” comes from someone who has cut himself off, to
whom then is it addressed? To an already constituted Muslim people,
already gathered together with itself? To a Muslim nation to come? A
particular nation—or a universalizable one? If this address has a sup-
posed addressee, is it already determined as Muslim? Or does, would, or
will it become Muslim only for having heard this call? When such a call
is launched or put forth, there would not yet be any Islam—or in any
case no Muslim yet. Islam would be the future [avenir], but then only to
come [à venir]. Nobody would be able to appeal to it as a given, no one
would be able to claim it as the past of a sealed letter ready for dogma,
orthodoxy, and dogmatism. And yet it is not a matter of erasing the past
or legacy of the letter in the name of the future but, quite to the contrary,
only, or rather, of withdrawing these notions (past, legacy, heritage,
given, seal, etc.) from a current and dominant interpretation: the past-
present of something available and appropriable, an object manipulable
by a subject, etc.
II. Being Muslim, Heir of Islam
This difficulty is thus translated, first of all, into the forms of a divided
call or contradictory injunction. This was the double provocation I
was thinking of as I listened to Abdesselam Cheddadi, and particularly
when he introduced himself with a singular force and virtue, and with
the courage of singularity, as an heir of Islam, to be sure, but not as a
“Muslim.” How to hear this?
I would first of all like to thank Abdesselam Cheddadi for a presen-
tation the memory of which will stay with me for a long time. He will
have given me a lot to think about, and on many subjects. I would like
to address myself directly to him to say more or less this: given the diffi-
culty of responding to all you’ve said, I really would have to listen to you
again, patiently, and more than once, phrase by phrase. My temptation
would be first to reflect in silence and wait.
Speaking of silence, I nevertheless found a little unfair the remarks
that you made concerning what you called my “silence” or my “absten-
tion” before the heading of the other. When you say that I “speak
60 What Comes
explicitly only of Europe” (I underline explicitly), the only way we could

agree on what “explicitly” possibly means (and it’s always unstable or
ambiguous) is by recognizing that in fact I speak only of or from out
of the other of Europe—and even (from out) of the other than Europe,
which is not simply the other of Europe. This is the meaning of t he—as
far as I’m c oncerned—decisive difference between the other heading, the
heading of the other, and the other of the heading. Therefore, I believe
that I speak only of and from out of that of which you reproach me
for not speaking of, even if, of course, I do n ot—and you are correct
there—deal with it in the form of substantial, sufficient analyses, far
from it.
In The Other Heading I insisted a lot on a certain division of the
heading [cap] (of the tip, the overhang, the phallus or head, the capital),
on the distinctions between the other heading, the heading of the other
and above all the other of the heading, the alterity of an other (he or she)
who does not have the convex and armed figure of the head. Also, you
say that I’m not concerned with the rest of the world. No doubt I will
never have a clear conscience on this matter, we never care enough for
the rest of the world, it’s true, and we’re always falling short [en reste]
with respect to this rest. But even if, from the depths of my finitude, alas,
I cannot take charge of the rest of the world “theoretically and practi-
cally,” a little essay like The Other Heading is not placed, dare I say it,
under the sign of lack of interest in the rest of the world. Under this title,
how would I have “removed the other heading from [my] analysis,”
as you suspect me of doing? It would be, in my mind at least, rather
the opposite, from the first. I say from the first because, of course, my
analyses of everything one can place under the title of the other heading
were, to be sure, in this essay of a few pages that I gave as a lecture,
obviously insufficient and inadequate, inherently poor. But I don’t want
to defend myself, and any project of self-justification would be indecent
here, in truth secondary with regard to the serious matters that you’re
broaching.
I often felt very close, in fact, to what you said. It’s very easy for me
to agree, for example, with what you’ve just said about the sealing off of
borders. I often emphasize, in my seminars and elsewhere, this seemingly
paradoxical logic: the moment one opens the borders inside Europe, the
Schengen Agreement locks them shut around Europe. This is not only a
figure, but it is also a figure, the emblem of a certain European project,
of an ongoing interpretation of the project of the “European Union.” I
agree with you also about the European construction of a certain figure
of Islam and of its history. Here, indeed, a deconstruction of this con-
struction seems necessary.
61
So I very often felt close to you. But close along the lines of the para-
doxes we’ve begun to explore, where proximity is sometimes a form of
extreme distance. I tried often to imagine what might be the political
figure your discourse was projecting, the immediately political deploy-
ment or translation of what I was able to understand of your remarks,
its concrete and actual deployment today. I didn’t always succeed in
figuring this out. At moments, however, I saw pass by something like
the silhouette of the politics implied by your discourse, very quickly, too
quickly, and I must say that it didn’t really or simply reassure me. No
doubt that was not your aim and, fortunately, we don’t always speak or
think in order to reassure others. But it was indeed a silhouette, and I’m
willing to accept the hypothesis of a hallucination or twisted perception
on my part.
I was particularly sensitive to what you called infernal logic. In The
Other Heading, which is a short essay among others that I wouldn’t
want to overcharge with meaning either, I try to analyze a combinatorial
logic just where it shows itself to be untenable. You said, and I under-
stood this to be a reproach, that my position was untenable: yes, I’m
trying to define the untenable. The untenable for a European or a non-
European. It is from out of the untenable, a certain untenability, that
decisions or responsibilities—a certain political responsibility—are to
be taken and kept like promises. It is within the experience of the unde-
cidable or the impossible that the decision or responsibility—if there is
any—would be possible. Possible as im-possible. If I decided only what
was possible, doable, programmable, and predictable, in scale with my
potentiality, I would then merely be deploying an ability, unfolding a
virtuality, verifying an aptitude. In a certain manner, then, I lay claim,
uncomfortably, to the difficulty of maintaining a certain position here.
From that point on, I sensed an oscillation in your discourse. On the
one hand, you take into account the division, scission, even fractaliza-
tion of Europe but also of Islam. You show effectively and justly this
impossibility of identifying, other than through phantasm, projection, or
construction, a certain unity of Europe itself or a certain unity of Islam
itself. But at other moments, I had the opposite impression: for reasons of
a more “political” strategy, you needed to reconstitute, under the names
of Europe and Islam, strong and immobile unities, identities that you
even came very close to hypostasizing. The exceptional heterogeneity of
which both Europe and Islam are made up was all of a sudden forgotten.
At the end, when you indulged in a troubled and vehement denunciation
of the present state of what “people” are making of Islam (“people”
meaning not only Europeans), this unalloyed denunciation seemed to me
a little unfair with regard to the resources this heterogeneity may hold
62 What Comes
in reserve. There are Islams, there are Europes. On both sides, certain
discourses cannot be so readily classified or accused. It seems to me it
is on this heterogeneity that perhaps we should place our bets, on both
sides. Not only from a “political” perspective.
So it was a little hard for me to follow you, especially at the end, since
you harshly condemn both contemporary Islam and the current state of
affairs in Arabo-Islamic countries, while, at the same time, putting the
responsibility for the wrong on a Europe that is itself hypostasized or
locked up in its unity. I feel more hesitant and uncertain, and I have a
hard time identifying and reflecting on such entities, a hard time believ-
ing them to be so stable and identical to themselves. All the more so
since at other moments—and here it was easier for me to agree with
you—you seemed to be rather doubtful of precisely this projection of
hypostasis or of phantasm. More than unease, this discourse, at least at
moments, caused me a political worry. A worry as to what it may, inten-
tionally or not, directly encourage today. But these are only, of course,
spontaneous impressions.
At a certain moment I felt myself again rather close to you and also
really interested in what you were taking the risk of saying, and yet . . .
It was when you introduced yourself as an “heir of Islam” rather than a
Muslim. It is difficult to understand this proposition, but it opens some
fascinating questions, questions of responsibility, first and foremost.
Must one assume the responsibility, memory, or heritage of every-
thing bound up with the body or soul of a religion (a culture, language,
history, a formation to which we would owe almost everything) once the
heart of the heart of religion—faith, in this instance being-Muslim—is
abandoned, disaffected, even questioned, or rejected or at the very least
suspended? Moreover, is this the faith you had in mind when you said
that you were not speaking here as a Muslim? Or were you referring
to the current figure of Islam (of the historical form, the dominant
structure of the interpretation of Islam, therefore also of its political,
theologico-political form, of everything that so-called Muslims project
in this image—and the others, in antagonistic or speculative fashion)?
Immediately after this, to complete your self-presentation, you called
yourself a “free citizen of the world.”
So, I take the liberty of submitting the following remark for your
reflection: this concept of free citizen of the world has a long, complex,
and multilayered history. This history would also call for a “deconstruc-
tion” of sorts which would lead us from Kantian-style cosmopolitanism
(about which there would be so much to say that is indirectly or par-
tially at work today in the law and charters of European, international
institutions of a fundamentally European type), back to Saint Augustine,
63
Saint Paul, and the Stoics. The cosmopolitanism of “free citizens of the
world” is found at the intersection of these two traditions, it bears the
memory of them. Within this memory, the Christian filiation seems to
me prevalent. Filiation would be just the right word since the familial
schema (the relation father/sons/brothers) decides everything here.
Saint Paul said more or less this to the Christians: “You are now no
longer citizens of a nation, or foreigners, you are citizens of the world.”
And he specified that this world was the house of God, the family of the
Christian God, of whom we are the sons. The cosmopolitical tradition
is, to this extent at least, a Christian tradition by its foundation. There
is a Christian element in the dominant figure of Europe and right up to
the cosmopolitically inspired discourse inseparable from it. Can we deny
this? I was wondering then, given your declared concern for deconstruc-
tion, what you make of this cosmopolitanism that you also claim.
In general terms, one can only follow you when you denounce Hegel’s
discourse on Islam. For a long time now, a certain number of us have
been engaged in this necessary exercise on not only Hegel’s Islam
but also on Hegel’s India or his Africa in general. The figure of the
“European spirit” that forms the theme of The Other Heading is first
and foremost a Hegelian figure, the invariant traits of which reappear in
Husserl’s, Valéry’s, and Heidegger’s variations and suchlike, despite so
many differences among them. Here I would too easily agree with you
and would have done so for a long time now—no doubt longer than you
yourself appear to believe.
The fact remains that it was a little hard for me to recognize myself
on the other side, where you were trying again to push me. Disarmed,
I prefer to confess to you a feeling in all the instability it still retains.
This instability seems to me to be also due to your “strategy:” you
tried to occupy—simultaneously or successively—all the positions. You
exhausted every possible combination in this infernal logic of all the
positions, as if you were somehow waging what you yourself c alled—so
as to objectify and label it—an ontological war where what is difficult is
tolerating the sovereignty of the other. Now, if I tried to show something
in The Other Heading, it is that it’s not enough to reckon with the other
heading, that is, the phantasms of the heading to be invested and reap-
propriated (drive to power or authority, desire to take the sovereign’s
place, the place of the head, of the captain, at the tip of the capital, of
the head, the chief, etc.), but that one must also do battle with the very
figure of sovereignty i tself—and therefore of the head(ing): the head(ing)
itself and in general, any head(ing). We won’t have gotten very far if we
do no more than take account of the other head(ing) and not the other
of the head(ing). I try, in my way, modestly, to take notice of this but
64 What Comes
nothing essential will be done if we do not let ourselves be summoned

(without summoning ourselves) by the other, the other of the head(ing),
the other of sovereignty. I don’t think this will end up in peace, purely
and simply (we’d have to ask ourselves here what “peace” is) but it
would at least put in question the forms of war you were evoking, the
so-called ontological war in particular.
What you said brought us back to the huge question of the name, the
name of Islam, but the name of Europe as well. What do people call
Islam? I had the feeling at times that you didn’t want anyone to appro-
priate this name and as it were to pin it down in a rigid manner. At other
times, I thought I understood something else and that you thought you
yourself knew what Islam is and what should be thus called, and what
you mean by this name, you who nonetheless claim to speak as an heir
of Islam rather than as a Muslim. It is in this zone that, listening to you
intensely, I am not sure I understood [entendu] you, really understood
either what you meant by this name Islam or what you wanted to prove
through a sort of radical protest that takes no prisoners.
III. Genealogy, Filiation, and Globalizations

[mondialisations]
I think we also came upon all of these themes again (the genealogy of
inheritance itself, the one for which one answers and, for example, the
inheritance of cosmopolitanism and thus of a certain globalization) in
Jean-Jacques Forté’s presentation, which broached them in a new and
original way. The work he has undertaken, and I say this as much out
of gratitude as out of hope, seems to me urgent and f undamental—I no
longer dare say capital. It is in any case imperative. I will limit myself to
raising three marginal questions.
First of all, I was tempted to defend the likeable Leibowitz whose
“mistake” concerning Kant was then “corrected.” Not just because I
have a certain admiration for the courage of his political stances, but
also because the “heart” is not simply the “pathological” for Kant. The
inscription of the law in the heart, like the ground of respect for the law
that is its cause, is assigned a very singular place by Kant: neither purely
sensible nor purely intelligible, between the intelligible and the sensible.
This is not without analogy, at least, with what Leibowitz says. But let’s
leave that for now.
Another question, both more general and more fundamental, would
concern at bottom the genealogical motif itself, in the wake of Jean-
Jacques Forté’s impressive and original work (following and concerning
65
Nietzsche) on the path toward origins that leads to barbarity and on what
he would propose calling global-judaization [mondiajudaïsation]—if the
risk of misunderstanding were not in fact so serious—echoing what I
myself dared (a lesser risk, fortunately, and altogether different, but a
risk all the same, I know) to call globalatinization [mondialatinisation].
I am more and more wary of certain connotations or consequences of
the genealogical motif, which I myself have often associated with decon-
struction. Indeed, when I’m asked to define deconstruction “in a nut-
shell” [in English in original], I often find myself saying, a bit too facilely
in order to go quickly: deconstruction is also something like genealogy in
a certain Nietzschean sense (Foucault also used to say this sometimes), a
genealogical movement that reconstitutes or deconstitutes by going back
toward a provenance, etc. Now here we must take certain risks, other
risks, and take them seriously, I think. The quest for the origin may well
lead to barbarity, to be sure; but in all genealogical schemas, we find two
worrisome motifs at work: on the one hand, a continuist axiomatics of
sorts, whether confessed or not, which tends to erase the rupture, the
“rending” decision, event, or mutation in a simple evolutive unfolding;
on the other hand, the search for filiation, the obsession with the family,
with a paternal or maternal symbolics, with a certain genetic “natural-
ity” even. This might then lead o ne—as I tried to show more patiently
in Politics of Friendship—to complicate this birth logic and this genea-
logic, or the association between deconstruction and genealogy. For
example, what I try to show in that essay on friendship is that the privi-
lege granted to a figure of familial kinship, the figure of the brother, the
son-brother as man, neighbor or fellow man, within the canonical and
prevalent friendship model, was fundamentally genealogistic, with all
the consequences one might draw from this. Consequently, if one wants
to “call into question” the privilege of filiation and in it the masculine
authority of the son-brother, one would perhaps have to deconstruct all
the way up to the authority of genealogy, suspend it at any rate. This
remark could take us further, to the point of suspending also the credit
we accord too easily to historicity itself. Deconstruction always operates
in the name of a certain historicity, who could ever claim the contrary?
But, in the concept of history—in what in any case ties deconstruction
to the reconstitution, to the deconstitution of a history, therefore of a
historicity—there is something that may present the same risks as those
entailed by genealogy. I will not argue for an ahistoricity of a non-
temporal type, of course, but in every temptation that I would call not
simply historicist but even historial, the return of the teleological lies in
wait for us, as does the return of filiation, the genealogical, this or that
filiation, patriarchal or matriarchal. Thus, I would perhaps understand
66 What Comes
in a much less confident manner the sentence that Jean-Jacques Forté

was kind enough to quote concerning the relation Greeks/Jews as the
place of historicity itself.
A last question would concern Egypt. Several times, an allusion was
made to a certain moment in the Quran where the Jews are defined as
Egyptians, etc. You’ve noticed how Egyptians come back in all the histo-
ries we’ve been talking about: the Egyptians for the Greeks, Egyptians in
the Quran, Jews as Egyptians. What then is the simultaneously singular,
excessive, and exemplary place of Egypt here? Our whole problematic
looks like a new discipline that could be nicknamed a neo-Egyptology.
We could pose this question to the Egyptian among us, so I turn to him:
if we wanted to go beyond this witticism and link this remark to the
serious political questions we are asking today—right now—concerning
Islam, the geopolitics of Islam or with regard to Islam, what is the place
of modern Egypt in this destiny?
Lastly, I will add a modest note to Forté’s concluding remarks con-
cerning a certain modernity. He spoke on this subject, in a manner
that was both daring and cautious, of the relations between a certain
“globalatinization” and a certain “global-judaization.” It is perhaps
fitting then to specify that the Christians themselves might not recognize
themselves in so-called globalatinization just as certain Jews would not
recognize themselves in so-called global-judaization. In support of this
equivalence or this homology between the two “global-judeo-romano-
christianizations,” etc., we could interpret the way in which Leibowitz
condemns a certain Israeli nationalism and militarism. This denuncia-
tion concerns, by the same token, an American-Israeli axis as well. And
is not this axis one of the essential pillars of globalatinization?
IV. The Given Deal of the Impossible or Substitution

(Gift, Re-gift, Giving Up)? Hagar and What Comes to Be
Lacking [vient à manquer]
I was very impressed and persuaded by Fethi Benslama’s argument. In

my view, this text is an event and I wish to express my immense grati-
tude for all that we were g iven—to understand and to think about.
So, I will start out again from the reference to this paradox of the
gift, of the possibility of the impossible: to give what one doesn’t have.
Although this phrase or formula seems to come from Lacan, he himself
didn’t have exclusive title to this property, which one could say he
inherited, as I point out somewhere (in Given Time, I think). He doesn’t
refer to Heidegger who said the same thing, who in turn does not refer
67
to Plotinus, who was the first to speak about [giving] something one
doesn’t have: an inappropriable inheritance, therefore, this thinking of
the gift as the gift of what one doesn’t possess—to someone who doesn’t
want it, and therefore will not possess it in turn. Gift without possible
appropriation, im-possible gift of the im-proper. Uninterrupted filiation
of a series of interruptions, the father or mother remaining unrecognized
by anyone.
Everything that was just given to us to think about also opens onto
the question of a surrogate mother. However irreducible it is in its
mutational novelty, the possibility, today’s “geno-technical” possibility
should also remind us that the mother has always been a “surrogate.” At
bottom, there is no natural mother, no genetic mother, and Freud also
“fell for this.” He basically says in The Rat Man that while the father is
always a “legal fiction” as Joyce used to say, the inference of a rational
judgment, the mother, well, as for her, maternity appeals to the testi-
mony of sense perception. Freud then draws from this, in a long foot-
note, the conclusion that a patriarchal society is a sign of progress since
paternity is grounded in reason whereas maternity relies on sensory
evidence. There is in Freud this praise for patriarchal societies with refer-
ence to this old phantasm: we know right away who the mother is and
we never know with total certainty who the father is. But the mother is
at bottom always symbolic, always in some way a “surrogate mother”
[in English in the original]. We cannot dwell on this now, but I tried to
work out the consequences of this problematic a little more patiently in
a seminar.
Among other things, what Fethi Benslama shows is that, if gift
[don] there is, it is linked somehow to the experience of abandonment
[abandon]. The primary Islamic experience as abandonment-salvation
would go in this direction. I was struck by the moment when a ques-
tion was raised that I quote or translate from memory thus: “How
do we know that there has been gift?” It seems to me that the gift
of the impossible structurally excludes that one can ever determine,
and determine by means of, precisely, a determinate judgment, with
knowledge and also with a probative archive, that there has been gift. If
there has been gift, one cannot know it. It is of an order that no longer
depends, that must no longer depend on knowledge. Wanting to know
and thus to determine if there has been gift is already the beginning
of the economic control of the gift, of its reinscription in the process
of assigning paternity, or even in the Hegelian dialectic that inscribes
the history of the gift and forgiveness [pardon] into the movement of
consciousness and self- knowledge (see Phenomenology of Spirit on
evil and forgiveness, just before the chapter on “Religion,” precisely).
68 What Comes
The originary father is ultimately the agent of this knowledge, this

believing-one-knows-that-there-has-been-gift.
Here is my hypothesis: what “is” commensurable, if one can still say
that, with the incommensurable that is the gift is an act of faith that gives
up on knowing whether there has been gift. The gift forever belongs to
the order of faith, it opens the order of faith, a faith that is irreducible
to any knowledge, even though it calls for and governs knowledge from
out of this non-knowledge. As concerns the gift, faith gives up on knowl-
edge and vice versa.
Perhaps there is “religion” (an institution distinct from pure faith,
already a “politics”) at the moment that this claim to know, this “sup-
posing to know” or this claim to knowledge, is produced, at the moment
of the determination of the gift, and thus of the appropriation of the
gift by this or that doxic or dogmatic institution of faith, by this or that
people or this or that language that institutes itself as the exceptional
custodian (and teacher) [dépositaire insigne (et enseignant)] of the
legacy.
In other words, the gesture of assigning paternity, of the certain
determination of the gift, etc. would produce, precisely, religion (Jewish,
Christian, Islamic) where one should always be able to distinguish,
however, between faith and religion as between two different logics,
which are sometimes indissociable despite their differences, but some-
times incompatible, in any case, always heterogeneous. The reinterpre-
tation of the originary father in this story of the gift reminds me of a
debate I had merely sketched out with [Jean-Luc] Marion as regards the
necessity for him to think the gift as the gift of the father; according to
him, it is necessary for the figure of the father to appear where it seems
to me that the pure gift, if there is any, should never remobilize this
familial configuration.
Naturally, it’s more impossible than ever for me to improvise a
reflection on such a rich piece of work that is destined, I believe, to be
a game-changer [changer toute la “donne”] for the interpretation of
these founding narratives. Yes, the “donne,” taking up Fethi Benslama’s
term when he proposes to call “donne de l’origine” this distribution of
originary elements around and the consistent consequence of the “there
is a there isn’t” [il y a un il n’y a pas].” When, telling us such new things
about the proper, gift, re-gift and abandonment, he declares that “the
father is lacking at the origin and his manifestation is always to come,” I
would be tempted to say that, like the gift, the father comes to be lacking
[vient à manquer]. And it is there that an event, if there is any, is coming,
comes from the future. Like a chance and like a threat, which today we
could illustrate with historical and political figures, notably in the rela-
69
tions among all the so-called Abrahamic religions and among the “sub-
stitutions” they perform from one to the other. As for substitution, and
thinking still of what Levinas and Massignon say about it, in an Abra-
Ibrahamic tradition, I also wondered what place (a new one, perhaps, I
don’t know) would be given to what is called the “sacrifice of Isaac” or
the “binding of Isaac” in this impressive interpretive d
isplacement—and
how to reread the “substitution” of the ram, which is not just any figure
and not just any animal (a Talmudic tradition sees in the ram a figure of
the originary father).
V. Names of a Dog by Heart, Doggone It [noms d’un

chien]! The Incalculable Ambiguity of the Poetic
Who are the animals? To whom do the names of animals, of animots,

refer? After the ram seen in a dream and the originary father who comes
to be lacking, we turn to the blind dog. With the feeling of dazzled
gratitude that Abdelfettah Kilito’s presentation inspired in me, I hardly
dare to ask a question. It will seem so clumsy now after this extraordi-
nary choreography of thinking, speaking, and writing. I was wondering,
among other things, how one could hear in it the echo of a certain dog of
Spinoza’s, of that famous and exemplary passage in which this Marrano
of sorts alludes to the word “dog” that doesn’t bark or that names
the heavenly constellation. A question of homonymy, this time, rather
than synonymy. But among all its threads and all the paths opened by
Abdelfettah Kilito’s meditation, are we not led to wonder today whether
at bottom the humanity to which the blind poet appeals resides in the
poem qua speech or capacity for speech (dogs would be those who
do not speak) or whether it resides within speech, a speech shared by
dogs and humans, within the capacity for synonymy. According to Al-
Ma‘arri’s rejoinder, he who speaks but does not know all the names
of the dog, the seventy names of the dog, remains a dog. The speaking
animal that man wants to be would remain a dog so long as he practices
a certain type of speech in which he isn’t sensitive to the multiplicity
and the play that synonymy inscribes in speech. In other words, the
border would not be drawn between speech and non-speech, between
the speaking being and non-speaking being, but, within the community
of speakers, between those who accede to an incalculable synonymy and
those who don’t. Does the poet who fails to find the last four synonyms
not also have the experience of a lack and therefore of an excess with
respect to what thus comes to be lacking? Namely, that there are always
more synonyms?
70 What Comes
The border would thus be drawn within speaking beings: between

those who have access to synonymy and the others, and, among the
former, between those who believe they can calculate synonymy and
master ambiguity (a great Aristotelian philosophical tradition: there is
ambiguity in language, but one should be able to master it and estab-
lish a hierarchy of meanings) and those who welcome ambiguity’s
incalculability, the poets who speak, come forward, and take the risk
of the incalculability of the surplus of meaning; they would be blind to
the extent that they hear only this incalculability, they know their way
around in it [ils s’y entendent] but beyond seeing and knowing. Here we
find ourselves again in the abyss of borders, borders within the border
itself, implicated and complicated enclaves, folded over and over again
to infinity.
I heard Kilito’s poem as a poem in memory of another poem. Does it
not consist in poetically engendering the events of a writing that folds
[plie], multiplies [multiplie] and thereby carries off the borders into this
abyss?
Speech is a certain blindness that sees. One speaks so long as one
doesn’t see and inasmuch as one doesn’t see, where and as soon as one
doesn’t see even if, otherwise, one does see. Speech is the blind one. The
element of hearing-speak is blind, blinding-blinded: blindness. The poet
is the blind one. Homer, Milton, Nietzsche, Joyce, Borges are but place-
holder names for this theory of blindness (that I tried to think through
elsewhere, in Memoirs of the Blind).
However, does blindness consist in simply speaking— or, within
speech, in opening oneself up to synonymy? To opening oneself up to
incalculable synonymy? The true poet would be one who invents lan-
guage and who, consequently, can always produce a further synonymy.
Where the same word comes to be lacking, that is to say, comes to take
on, in the coming of its event, more than one meaning, a surplus of
meaning [d’un plus de sens]. And of reference. That is, to cause to come,
in the same word, an extra word [un mot de plus]. What is that, an extra
synonym? In fact, it is an apparently useless word. But the useless word
says perhaps the essence of a speech that is no longer communication
or informational instrumentality, but rather nomination or even prayer.
Why synonyms? Isn’t synonymy the space of poetry within language?
What is gripping in this story seems also to be the rhetorical tour de
force, the poetic coup de force, the force to overturn a coup d’état [une
prise de pouvoir]. The poet’s genius here is measured not only by the
degree to which he or she surrenders to a synonymy’s incalculability;
it also rests in his or her politico-rhetorical power, in war itself. When
he says, on being called a dog: “the dog is the one who . . .,” this is an
71
unheard-of rejoinder that is inaudible in its force because it’s not at all
a question of a disarmed poet. It’s equally perfidious and perverse. The
incalculability of countless synonyms may likewise be interpreted as the
innocent chance of the poet in his or her relation to language, as the
adventure, the coming, the opening, or the engendering of poetic events
that are unforeseeable, unprogrammable, incalculable, even messianic.
But isn’t it also ruse, war machine, the site of unassailable strategy? The
language of war no less than the language of peace? We can always
make more than one use of the incalculable, the best and the worst. One
would have a hard time deciding if one’s dealing with a good one or a
bad one. It’s a bitch [un chien], if I may put it like that.
What about the link between the poetic act and learning by heart, the
quasi-mechanical repetition of the same signifying or prosodic forms,
etc., in which the act of understanding meaning, the perception, apper-
ception, or intuition of meaning or even of synonymy is not even essen-
tial? Isn’t this absence of intuition of meaning, of intuition to meaning,
of seeing meaning, another figure of blindness? Essential blindness of
the poetic act.
At that point, perhaps we are beyond synonymy. The signifier becomes
secondary in a way in synonymy, which remains a hierarchical authority
of meaning over the signifying or prosodic form, watches over the body
of words, and supervises the semantic body of language. Several words,
several names can say indifferently the same thing; whereas in learning
by heart one is turned toward the signifier’s irreplaceability and is less
attentive to the richness or to the semantic force of synonymy.
Let’s imagine that, instead of blind dog, he had been called something
else? Is the word “dog” replaceable in this story, and, if not, why?
Maarrat, the polysemic name of the poet Ma‘arri’s town, the name
that Abu Ja’far exploits, also signifies sin, scab, shame, c rime . . . But
the necessity of the dog shows up where there is an essential relation
between the canine species and blindness. The dog is the one who sees,
as we were reminded. The dog is in fact not the barking animal, but the
seeing animal. It is known for the sharpness of its sight. In fact, the blind
dog is the animal who is deprived of its own [propre] essentiality, an
animal as it were deprived of its property [propriété], like a human who
doesn’t speak. A non-speaking human would be (like) a blind dog. The
reference to the meaning of “dog” is therefore irreplaceable, in a certain
way. But what are the synonyms for dog in Arabic?
Dog names: for there to be a stable reference, one must know or think
one knows what a dog is; well, there are many equivalent names for
this thing; and to those who insult him by calling him “blind dog,” he
responds that that they don’t know what they’re saying since they don’t
72 What Comes
know all the meanings, all the ways of naming the dog, all the canine or
cynical turns and tropes. Synonyms are really other names for the same
meaning.
I wrote a little text on poetry, “Che cos’è la poesia?” (it’s about a
hedgehog that doesn’t see either, a blind or homeric hedgehog); its
“thesis”—if I can use this word with a straight face—is that there is a
link between poetic experience and “learning by heart.” I was keen to
list in several languages the expression “to learn by heart.” I knew some
of them, but I didn’t know how to translate “by heart” into Arabic.
Adonis once wrote this Arabic equivalent down on a restaurant napkin
for me that I carefully preserve. I transcribed it under Adonis’s dictation
and later, mechanically reproducing it, I published it. Today, I fear that,
now that it’s published, I’ve forgotten it. It is, I think, hafiza a’n zahri
kalb.
VI. All the Possible Names of the World
Jean-Philippe Milet has set in motion a powerful and formidable ques-

tioning machine. It would have been hubristic and even irresponsible
of me to presume to improvise a substantial response to it right away.
So I have in advance given up on any such ambition, confining myself
instead to a few clumsy, insufficient, inchoate, and scattered remarks. In
an attempt to bring our discussion back to the place of this conference
and the shared disquiet that brings us together here, I wondered about
Heidegger’s gesture with respect to the question of w orld—regardless
of its potential scope to go beyond any one language or network of lan-
guages. To what extent is this meditation on the different senses of the
word “world,” on the history of “cosmos,” “mundus,” etc., translatable
into non-Greek, non-German, or non-Latin idioms? This history has a
large-scale scansion: the pre-Christian cosmos, (adornment, order, etc.),
which is neither earth nor universe nor world, then the Christian world
(creation and the ages), and next Weltlichkeit and the way Heidegger
tried to write it, which can in principle be articulated neither in Greek nor
in Latin, in accordance with neither the Greek cosmos nor the Christian
world. To what extent can this (thinking, philosophical or poetic) gesture
be translated into languages other than Greek, Latin, or German?
In other words, it’s the same question as the dog question: are there
synonyms for the word “world”? And how many?
The question of synonyms is posed within a given language; but can
the question of intralinguistic synonymy be posed as a question of trans-
lation? Is there a synonymy of “world”? And how is this synonymy to be
73
thought in other languages, non-European languages, in the broad and

enigmatic sense of this word?
Since I’ve been drawn into a threesome of sorts where I don’t know if
I’m the marquise, I’ll take my bearings as best I can, toward a hypoth-
esis I’d like to sketch out at least. Jean-Philippe Milet has analyzed and
questioned a famous Husserl text in a remarkable manner. I’ve always
been very interested in this text; I had begun translating and interpret-
ing it some thirty-five years ago in The Introduction to the Origin of
Geometry. Now, this rather late text may be compared, from a certain
perspective, to a passage from a much earlier work, Ideen. The essay
on the archi-originary earth basically tells us that Copernican science,
which constitutes the earth as a moving object, presupposes a zero-
point of perception, an originary or archic soil. Husserl calls this the
transcendental earth. This zero-point is not only the origin of a possible
science, of an objective geometry, of a cosmology or a geophysics, but
also, first and foremost, the immobile and absolute origin of the world
for everyone. Now, in Ideen I, §49, I think, Husserl mentions, under
the heading of the epochē, the hypothesis, fiction or radical “imagi-
nary variation” of a total destruction of the world, the annihilation of
every existence, or again its absolute disorder, its becoming-chaos, the
juxtaposition of “simulacra by dint of internal conflicts:” this would
not affect, in the least, either in principle or in essence, the absolute
origin of the world; the pure transcendental ego, to which transcen-
dental reduction thus gives access, does not belong to the world, which
in turn is there for the ego. In its experience of the here and now, the
absolute transcendental ego is absolutely independent of the world, of
the existence of the world—and therefore of the existence of the earth.
But it’s the same thing, this is the place that is immobile. It does not
move. Wherever it goes, it carries with it its own “here.” Consequently
it doesn’t budge. This is the fundamental gesture of phenomenology: to
call us back to the archi-originary extra-worldliness of a being named
“subject” or transcendental ego. When Heidegger, for his part, recalls
that Dasein’s being is “in the world,” he is thus not simply reinscribing
this being “in” a world already submitted to phenomenological epochē,
he is in fact radically changing the interpretation of the word “world
[Welt].” His question, his calling transcendental idealism into ques-
tion, basically amounts to this: how do we justify the interpretation of
the “world” as totality of possible objects? Otherwise, why determine
beings as objects? As objects for a subject? And what is the genealogy of
this interpretation or this presupposition as to the world?
Without getting back into this huge debate, we can separate out
some ethico-political consequences. Husserl distinguishes three d ifferent
74 What Comes
stages when he analyzes the history of reason, i.e. the history of phi-
losophy, its teleological orientation toward an egological community of
transcendental intersubjectivity. The first stage comprises “everyone”
human [“tout le monde” humain]; and rational humanity, he says,
includes “even the Papuans;” the second has to do with the appearance
of the idea of philosophy in Greece, phenomenology being prefigured
by this figure of “spiritual (non-empirical, non-geographical) Greece;”
the third is distinguished by the infinite idea of transcendental phenom-
enology finally arrived at its telos, as was already announced, but only
announced, through Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc. The rationality of this
transcendental phenomenology and of this “ideal community” would be
fully and actually universal; it would at last bring to fulfillment what is
announced at the origin of philosophy in the spiritual figure of Greece.
That is, very briefly, what would link this extraordinary text on the
earth that does not move to the transcendental reduction as reduction of
the world, and therefore to the hypothesis constitutive of phenomeno-
logical epochē, according to which the world could disappear without
the transcendental ego being affected in its pure eidos. This science of
phenomenality, this discourse of phenomenology as such bespeaks,
to be sure, the unity and unicity of the world: there is indeed only one
world and this world is what appears to the transcendental ego precisely
where the existent world is no more. The world, worlds, and the plural-
ity of cultures—all that is one only insofar as it is able to disappear: all of
that, the totality of objective beings, can appear only if it can disappear
de facto, in reality, empirically, without jeopardizing the universal ego’s
ability to appear to itself in its essence (in principle and de jure). The dis-
appearance of the factual world should not affect the essential integrity
of the pure transcendental ego, of its pure consciousness, which is the
principle of the unity of the world.
What would happen if we tried relating this very schematic reminder
to the fundamental question put to us here, namely that of the arrivant
or foreigner who may well come from another world? On the one hand,
this unity of the world, its absolute teleological horizon, does not leave
any room for the alterity or radical foreignness of this other, for the
messianic event, even, that would mark the advent of this absolute arri-
vant—no room for any “other world:” in this respect, there is no such
thing as pure hospitality, no visitation that could not be anticipated. But
at the same time, this unity of the world also remains the condition of
welcoming, hospitality, recognition: no matter from how far the other
man comes, he belongs to the same world and is not an absolute for-
eigner, etc. Here then is a guiding thread for analyzing two concurrent
and contradictory laws of hospitality and the event thought of as arrival
75
[arrivance]. Either or: either an invitation with a horizon of expectation,

i.e. the unity of the world, structures of welcoming, authority left in the
hands of the host who remains master of his house, or else the visita-
tion of the absolute arrivant, without any horizon of expectation, etc.,
without even so much as a putative “world-unity.” The absolute arri-
vant interrupts the unity of world and history, changing the world in its
ultimate ground, and affecting the absolute being-at-home.
At the end of his presentation, Jean- Philippe Milet spoke of the
logic of the perhaps, which he linked to what would be called proba-
bilistic logic in modernity. I wonder whether, paradoxically, proba-
bilistic logic—which remains Leibnizian and within the order of
calculability—
would not be incompatible with this thinking of the
“perhaps.” What I am tempted to call the “logic” of the “perhaps”
endures or welcomes the experience of the incalculable, a radical incal-
culable, an incalculable. Even if our (juridical, ethical, political) respon-
sibility then requires that we negotiate and thus calculate with or count
on the incalculable. It is by delving into the between of those two logics,
between calculable logic and the logic of the “perhaps,” that we might
perhaps be able to recognize the between that concerns us here, the
between of borders, the between of cultures, the between of between-
one-and-the-other, etc. It is in this between of the perhaps that I would
situate, without being able to identify it either objectively or ontologi-
cally, the taking-place of this event, the experience of the arrivant who
destroys or deconstructs, who disturbs the entire structure of Leibnizian
discourse, of course; but also Husserlian-Heideggerian discourse at the
point where, in spite of so many differences, everything they say, all of
them, about the world presupposes a horizon of pre-comprehension,
a presumption of unity, a presupposition of coherence, of belonging,
the logos or legein of a gathering, a horizon from out of which or on
the basis of which everything that arrives arrives as such. For them
(and, to a certain extent, for us as well), this is very clearly self-evident:
whatever foreign thing arrives, it ought to be inscribed within a space
of pre-comprehension or anticipation, in a horizon of meaning; and
this is even the condition of meaning. I am well aware of this necessity.
I yield and submit to it. Nevertheless, I would be tempted to dare say
that, if there really is such a thing as an other, absolutely other arrivant,
it must break open this horizon, there must no longer be a horizon; or,
rather, that this horizon, even before letting itself be traversed, must be
traversed, passively, by some wholly other. That is exactly what would
be demanded (without anything being demanded) by the surprise of the
absolute arrivant, of the other wholly other [de l’autre tout autre] that
I encounter or who breaks into a space that I call my own or that I try
76 What Comes
to appropriate for myself. I must prepare myself to welcome that (he

or she) for which all preparation is a priori inadequate and insufficient,
impossible even. To speak of the foreigner is to speak of the possibility
of this very im-possible itself, and of this im-possible world. Of an im-
possibility of the world that is not negative, that remains the chance, the
chance of the o ther—and of all possible worlds. And therefore of the
event, the future and history. This surprise must take place for there to
be future and arrivance of the arrivant, so that it can arrive, this arrival,
where I have no horizon, where I don’t even expect it. In other words,
what presses upon us here is the question of the horizon of expectation,
that is, the question of an experience without a horizon of expectation:
relation to the future, to the other, to the e vent—and to death, beyond
any horizon of expectation, that is to say, beyond any possible world, a
priori possible as such.
It’s very difficult to maintain this, it’s a subtle but serious break with
the powerful discourses of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger,
etc. An expectation without horizon of e xpectation—that’s my relation
to the other. And I must expect not to expect, expect, without knowing,
that the other might arrive absolutely at every moment. If what I’m
saying here makes any sense, it’s a limit of sense, and if this limit of
sense has any sense to it, if it “makes sense” [in English in original],
I hope that what I’m saying isn’t altogether unintelligible at the very
moment when it withdraws from the horizon of sense. So, what is world
in this instance? To put it schematically, always too schematically, this
may perhaps have very concrete political, ethical, and juridical conse-
quences. The unity without unity of the world is what I “share” with
anyone, with any “arrivant,” any living being, human or animal, with
every “arrivant” who has the “same” experience as me. The “same” as
completely other as well. And I “know by experience” that my here-and-
now is absolutely untranslatable and that the world in which I speak is
absolutely heterogeneous. It has nothing in common with the world of
each one of you here. What I feel in myself, what I live within myself, the
way in which words come to my mind, all of this is absolutely incom-
mensurable. With the multiplicity of those who receive it, understand it
more or less, each in his or her own way, from a here infinitely different
from my own, there is no common space: this distance between someone
else’s here and my own is infinite; each other and each other moment
of myself, is further from me, right here and now, than the moon, etc.
What I’m saying here is distressingly banal, but I’m trying to take this
necessity into account. There is between two “heres” a properly infinite
irreducibility and heterogeneity. We experience this when we die, but
also at every moment.
77
And yet there is “world.” Ultimately, this infinite alterity, this infinite
irreducibility of an incommensurable distance, this absolute incommen-
surability doesn’t stop things from happening: speaking to one another,
waging wars, dreaming of peace, being overwhelmed by compassion. To
the contrary, this alterity, this impossibility is the condition for them to
happen. There is an infinity of untranslatable worlds and this untrans-
latability is the condition for the arrival of one for the other: this is the
uns we were talking about at the beginning. This is extremely trivial,
but with a triviality that fails to be taken into account by the powerful
and very respectable discourses that make and are our history. This very
simple thing has no horizon, it is the absence of horizon. The arrivant
must be so surprising to me that I can’t even determine it as human.
When we define nationality, etc., we speak of humans. Now, the other
who might come may be a god or a dog, and I can’t even anticipate that
the arrivant has a human face. In this social dis-solution [dé-liaison] I
am bound to whomever and the hospitality unconditionally opened to
the arrivant ought to expose me to any arrivant whatsoever, but also to
what we so quickly call an animal or a god. Good or evil, life or death.
The logic of the “perhaps” must perhaps still be inscribed into the
logic of probability; in which case the uninscribable inscribes itself and
we must speak of these things, these events, these experiences that pos-
sibly make no sense at all. It is by bending what doesn’t yet make sense
to the horizon of sense, by bending it back this way and not that way,
that I can promise, promise a to-come [à-venir] or promise myself to the
event of arrivance. What doesn’t announce itself still announces itself
as that which doesn’t announce itself. This heterogeneity I am talking
about here inscribes itself: it leaves its imprint of uninscribability upon
the surface that cannot receive it and to which it is heterogeneous. I’m
making something that is not logical pass into a logical discourse. I still
anticipate the non-anticipatable. Not as such, but as what evades the
as such. In any case I say it or believe I can say it. I believe I can bear
witness to it.
We are within a topology of the absolutely irreducible “here,” a
“here” that I already apprehend as the “over there” of the other. I am
your “here,” you are here for me, but I am an “over there” for you.
Every here is a world and the opening of a world, and every birth: and
every death is the end of the w orld—death is a world that disappears.
And if each death is the end of a world, there is an infinity of worlds.
What we call world is the indispensable, vital, assumption or presump-
tion of a “credible” gathering (I mean that it depends on an act of faith
without knowledge), of a collecting [colligere], a reception [accueil],
and a gathering up [recueillement] of this infinity of worlds, of possible
78 What Comes
and real worlds. Obviously, if there were only this scattered infinity of
real worlds, it would be unlivable, there would be no relation to others;
and what we call “the world” is the irreducible anticipation, in an act
of faith, the presumption of a community, a gathering of this infinite
scatter of worlds. This is faith itself. And it is because there is an infinite
scattering that the miserable attempt to constitute a gathered and com-
munitarized horizon—i.e. f aith—makes the history we’re talking about.
If we link sense to horizon, to logos, to the collocation of collection, to
gathering or gathering up, this very plurality, qua pure plurality, makes
no sense. But this not-making-sense [pas-de-sens] is not only negative.
It’s not a loss, it is also the chance of any speech, of the emergence of
sense; it is chance in the not-making-sense, through it; the borderline
between this “through” is experience, experience that is authority, but
an authority that expiates itself, as Blanchot and Bataille say, more or
less.
If we take the measure of the very thin speculative generality of what I
am saying here, we then have to assume that this began before humans,
with protozoa already. This has to do with the living being in general
which already, as you know, remains a supposed unity.
So as also to mark otherwise an order of undecidability, we can invert
the question posed. How could calculability ever be determined if not
on the basis of the chaotic ground of the incalculable? Or on the basis
of a “perhaps” that would not encircle the horizon of the calculable,
but that also precedes, bears, and exceeds it in its very “inside”? When I
think of the tradition of the “perhaps,” I think less of Heidegger and cal-
culation than of Nietzsche who says, speaking of the future, that other
philosophers will come one day as the philosophers of the “dangerous
perhaps.” This isn’t related to calculation, but to dialectics. Nietzsche
says that metaphysicians couldn’t think opposites that cannot be synthe-
sized, non-dialectical opposites. It is beyond this metaphysical tradition
that the “philosophers of the dangerous perhaps” would be heralded for
the future.
If experience presupposes intentionality, the horizon of sense, etc.,
then everything I’ve said runs up against a serious limit. The dominant
usage of the concept of experience in philosophy, and particularly in
Husserl, strongly confirms everything Jean-Philippe Milet has just dem-
onstrated. Yes, for Husserl the pole of the transcendental ego is not this
or that world, but the infinite horizon of experience. But in this strong
and perhaps all-powerful tradition determining the dominant semantics
of the word “experience,” the very heart of this experience remains
perhaps unthought. For what I am trying to emphasize is that, con-
versely, there would be no such thing as experience (if “experience” also
79
means traversal, encounter with what comes, being affected by what

arrives, by what isn’t oneself), there is experience in the strong sense of
the term only where I am affected by something wholly other than me,
by an irreducible “plurality of worlds.” In this experience “something”
other comes upon me, be it someone, the advent of what advenes, be
it anything or anyone at all. There is no experience otherwise. For an
ego to be affected by something other, intentional anticipation must
be thwarted or severed, in any case overwhelmed, caught by surprise.
Wherever I’m able to deploy a horizon of intentionality, I deaden or
neutralize this coming of the o ther—limiting experience thereby. And
whatever the necessity of horizons of intentionality, etc., these horizons
deaden the alterity of what comes and, as a result, limit experience itself.
The horizon of expectation must therefore be interrupted and fissured
somewhere. That’s experience. Naturally I cannot submit this discourse
on experience or the description of this experience to the phenomeno-
logical protocol—by definition. I realize that there’s a lot at stake here
for phenomenology. This doesn’t, of course, disqualify phenomenology
or its tradition. The latter retains its rights, its force and its field, but one
must, or one can, trace its limits. From this perspective we can basically
say what was said already: “We don’t have an intentional experience
of the unconscious,” but this depends on what we mean by experience.
Besides, Husserl was also interested in the unconscious. No doubt we
don’t have an experience of the unconscious that could be described in
the terms of strict Husserlian phenomenology. The unconscious cannot
be described by means of the Husserlian phenomenological apparatus.
But I would be tempted to say that not only are there experiences of the
unconscious, but also that there is experience only on the condition of
the unconscious, on condition that there be some unconscious. In gath-
ering no less than in self-knowledge, in presence as self-presence, con-
sciousness bears within itself, on the horizon of what tends to reflect it
into self-consciousness, the annulment of experience itself: the affective
encounter, at the heart of an unintentional passivity, of the arrivant, of
the wholly other arriving upon us. Upon us, that is, by surprise, where
the verticality of absolute height signifies the event, with no presumption
of mastery or reappropriation, at the limit of anticipation, presumption,
prediction, and the future as future present.
VII. Translations of l’hôte
By relating the question of translation so appropriately back to the ques-

tion of hospitality, and even to the root of hospitality (Dayafa), Farid
80 What Comes
Zahi gives me another c hance—and I thank him for it—to express my

gratitude. A gratitude I myself do not know how to delimit. Beyond
the welcome that is so generously given to me here, now, by you, I am
well aware that with all its enigmas a hospitality is in process far away,
through texts, translations, work on language, a hospitality that goes
well beyond us, has done so for a long time, and will do so for a long
time to come.
The fact that the translation of Specters of Marx was done by a
woman, a Lebanese woman, is important for many reasons. I do not
know if this is a rare occurrence for translations into Arabic, but I attach
a great importance to the fact that all over the world it is women who
take on many translations and interpretative responsibilities. This fact
itself, which I could not put into objective numbers, would still need
to be interpreted, as would this other fact to which I can attest: a great
number of my books, perhaps even the majority, were translated by a
woman’s hand and, most often, admirably so (I’m thinking particularly
of the English translation of Specters of Marx by Peggy Kamuf, who
has published several exemplary translations of other books; similarly
Specters of Marx was translated into German by a woman, Suzanne
Lüdemann). I insist on this point because, as I see it, translators are the
best readers. And even the only readers, if one believes, as I’m tempted
to, that the vigilant reader is always attentive to what in a text is at
work in the idiomatic body of language, exposes and hides itself in those
places where translation seems at once denied and for that very reason
called for. Whoever reads a text, and reads it well by giving all necessary
attention to the idiom, the work of writing, the singularity of its compo-
sition, etc.—is in the position of the translator, already testing out, so as
to be put to the test, the resistance of a thinking, poetic, and idiomatic
writing. This is also the reason, and a good reason at that, why those
signing a so-called “original” text are scared of translators. As they
wrestle with the text, translators also identify weaknesses, contingen-
cies, and the other possibilities left dormant by an interruption. When
translators ask me questions, I realize that I could have written this or
that otherwise and better, that I no doubt ought to have written it oth-
erwise; and that, all of a sudden, an element of the aleatory has thereby
become fixed at a place where, by thinking of the translation to come, I
could and should have written differently, which is also to say something
else. In the strong sense of this word, an ordeal of truth is happening
here; as well as a question about this truth when it is the truth of what
ties a truth to the chance of the idiom.
The fact that a woman translated and signed Specters of Marx into
Arabic and that the translation was “pirated,” outside the law, would
81
deserve another book. It is another book. Leafing through it like a blind

(dog) man, I noticed, by way of a few non-Arabic signs that I could
therefore decipher, that it had been a little rushed, although I don’t
know if I have the right to complain or make accusations here. I even
loved the word chosen for “specters,” the purpose and connotations of
which Farid Zahi recalled. I’m not unhappy that Specters of Marx—
amidst the regulated drift that every translation always is as it invents its
own rules—should also call forth, in sum, the poetry of love and even
the image of the prophet, the return of the beloved in a prophetic code,
even if this is not exactly or only or directly what I meant to say, or
believed or intended I meant to say. Here, it’s a matter of another text,
but not just any text. It speaks to me, it answers me, it speaks with me
and with the translated book even when I don’t control all the meaning.
That interests me. Translate: this engages me at the heart of translation
itself. I’m right there, I find and re-find myself interested there, in a text
that goes beyond me on all sides, even where I know nothing about it,
where I couldn’t reappropriate into consciousness.
This leads me to a few remarks.
Let’s take up again the example of “positions” whose different possi-
bilities were brilliantly analyzed by Farid Zahi. The mobility of the word
“positions” in French (which I comment on in a note when I choose this
word) runs through, among other places, the sexual position. In French,
“positions” in the plural are also situations, poses, and movements of
bodies making love, the intercourse [corps à corps] of two sexed beings,
male and female, male and male or female and female, every possible
combination being at work in the text. For position, of course, is the
thesis (thesis or Setzung), and also, as a result, the ideological position,
the position or parti pris in politics. All of this is not readily translat-
able in one word, even in languages where the same word is used (in
English, for example, the same word “position” isn’t used for sexual
intercourse, nor is it in German, as far as I know at least). Something
therefore already gets lost when the same word is kept. “Something”
that gives rise already in French to a silent and furtive translation opera-
tion. When one writes one is already operating, within what is supposed
to be one and the same language, a displacement, a transfer that belongs
to the order of translation. Whence the difficulty or even impossibility of
translating one language into another economically . . .
For the difficulty remains always one of an economic sort. This is
the difficulty of the translation of one word by another word, of one
lexical unit by another. There is no such thing as absolute untranslat-
ability, only this impossibility of quantitative, arithmetic, economic
equivalence. But if we remove this question of quantity, everything is
82 What Comes
translatable—except for what no longer has to do with the intercourse

[corps à corps] between one language and another, that is, the dual or
plural in one and the same language. What, already in what is supposed
to be one language, is more than one language—that’s absolute untrans-
latability. For there is always more than one language in a language, in
what one calls a language. The moment one translates, one reduces the
plural to one. What’s always difficult to translate, beyond the difficul-
ties that are traditionally noticed, is the multiplicity of languages within
one language, something that happens all the time. Even when nothing
but French words are used, one can, like Joyce, make several languages
compete and converge, graft onto each other very visibly. (Not long ago,
in Ulysses Gramophone, I called attention to the example of “And he
war” which in a single moment of the text, causes to converge in one
and the same word, “war,” an English word (war) as well as a German
one (“was” or “used to be”) to produce a great force of meaning; thus,
at least in principle, everything can be translated word-for-word except
for the graft’s proliferating and active multiplicity.) But even if one
remains confined in absolute monolingualism, one can carry out opera-
tions through which language translates itself and produces a dispersion,
a pluralizing of the idiom within the idiom—which represents an abso-
lute limit, unless one translates into several languages, unless one invents
several languages within one language via a grafting or prosthetic opera-
tion which in turn engenders more than just one language in a language.
This last possibility would have to be taken as a political model, one I
find highly significant, if one were to follow out its consequences, both
direct and indirect.
I hardly dare recall what I once happened to say: if I had to venture
a definition of deconstruction, I’d say simply: “plus d’une langue.”
Deconstruction is not untranslatable, but bound to the question of the
untranslatable. It is always bound to some idiom, but not at all to the
idiom as an intact singularity but rather to the idiom already undergoing
translation, performing alterity within itself in an inevitable movement
of ex-appropriation. If I am interested in writing, what guides me is the
desire to make something happen to the French language, something
that at first seems untranslatable into another language, but that at the
same time, and through the process of this very challenge, calls to this
other language, to the other’s idiom. I have the feeling of writing only
when I write things that seem untranslatable at first blush; not in order
to make a text opaque and inaccessible but, quite to the contrary, to
offer or expose it to translation—which is reading itself, when it does
not rush, beyond the trace, toward the erasure of the body and the mis-
recognition of the mark. To write things that are readily translatable
83
is not writing at all, nor does it call for translation. Only what seems
to be untranslatable at first glance calls for translation. And not only
for translation into what linguists call another language, but also for
translation within one and the same language. In other words, my desire
is that one be unable, that is also, and for this very reason, obliged, to
translate me even into French. And at the same time, that one can have
only one desire, that of translating—and that’s reading, whether this
risk be taken by a Francophone on a French text, an Arabophone on an
Arabic text or a Berberophone on a Berber text.
After all, a text “in its own original language” is never readable
outside a large number of translation operations—and very complex
ones, more indirect than is usually thought, even for the apparently
simplest languages. It could happen that a text has a greater chance of
being better read in a particular translation than in its so-called original
language. A “politics of translation” must take this into account. All
of our misgivings today converge on this great question of a politics
of translation (among Arabic, Berber, all the languages of the Islamic
world and the others, among the others and those of the Islamic world).
This “politics of translation”—for all that it should be sustained, organ-
ized, resolute, ambitious, growing—ought not to be merely a “politics”
or a “political economy” relying solely on the initiative of states or the
market (however necessary this may be); and even less must it rely on
the initiative of theologico-political powers that may, here and there,
control states or market, identify with them or be determined by them.
Since these translation issues were written into the space of hospital-
ity, allow me to mention a work that I recently tried to analyze in a
seminar just before coming to Rabat. It’s a short story by Camus in Exile
and the Kingdom titled “The Guest [L’hôte].” In English this title is
translated as guest, the invited, received, or welcomed guest. But, as you
know, “hôte” in French also refers to one who invites or receives, the
host. As hospitable as the English translation may be qua translation, its
hospitality falls short here insofar as it loses a resource of the received
text, of its hôte (in English: of its guest precisely). And the loss doesn’t
affect only a single word, but a whole dimension of the story, an entire
possible reading of it. Colonization is also at stake here. On reading
this story—a sort of a condensed metonymy of French Algeria—one
does not know who is the host [and who is the guest]. Daru is a village
schoolmaster who also gives lessons on French rivers that are drawn on
his blackboard. All of a sudden he sees coming toward him a French
policeman named Balducci, and an Algerian whose hands are bound.
The policeman has come to ask the teacher to lodge the prisoner for
the night and deliver him the next day to the police station a few
84 What Comes
ilometers away. During a very brief scene, the teacher, respectful of

k
the laws of hospitality and of a certain kind of fraternity, refuses to
deliver his anonymous guest, “the Arab” (this is the same name as in
The Stranger; every character figuring colonization—the Teacher: Daru,
the Gendarme: Balducci—has a proper name, only the Arab bears either
a common name or an anonymous proper name, as it were). The police-
man insists, then leaves. The French teacher lives an entire day with the
Arab, his Algerian prisoner or hostage; we therefore don’t know if he’s
the hôte in the sense of guest or host, given that the colonizer is a certain
kind of hôte. He’s home, he’s a native (“This is the way the region was,
cruel to live in even without men—who didn’t help matters either. But
Daru had been born here. Everywhere else, he felt exiled”),7 but he’s
at home in the other’s home, the Arab’s home. He’s also the guest and
hostage of the prisoner he is holding hostage. When Camus writes: “No
one in this desert, neither he nor his hôte, mattered. And yet, outside
this desert neither of them, Daru knew, could have really lived” (ibid.).
His hôte signifies both the welcoming host and the welcomed guest (host
as well as guest). Following a scene that is both very dense and very
simple, too difficult to summarize, and in which the only spoken (but not
exchanged) words addressed to his laconic guest/host are very significant
(“Hi [Salut],” “Come, you,” “come with us,” “go,” “let us go,” “Take
it . . . there are dates, bread, and sugar” [ibid.]), Daru, in the solitude of
his responsibility, decides on his own not to deliver his hôte, the hôte of
whom he is himself the hôte since he is in Algeria, the Algerian’s home.
He feeds him and walks with him outside of the school where he tells
him two things in succession, leaving him free to choose between two
paths, two laws: the law of the police and the law of hospitality (a hospi-
tality which, in the tradition of Muslim law, has as we know its roots in
a nomadic and likely pre-Islamic culture.) First, he shows him the way to
the “police and the administration” (“‘Now look,’ the schoolmaster said
as he pointed in the direction of the east, ‘there’s the way to Tinguit. You
have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit you’ll find the administration and the
police. They are expecting you’”). Then he turns him around, although
“rather roughly,” to show him the other path, the path to freedom, “a
faint path:”8 “still holding the package and the money against his chest.
Daru took his elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south.
At the foot of the height on which they stood could be seen a faint path.
7 [Translator’s note] Albert Camus, “The Guest,” in Exile and The Kingdom,
trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1957). Translation slightly modified.
8 [Translator’s note] What follows is a verbatim quotation from Camus’s
“L’hôte.”
85
That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk from here you’ll find
pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you
according to their law.”
Two solitudes, then, a double isolation. Daru, the hôte, lets the Arab,
his hôte, the hôte of the hôte, the hostage of the hostage, make his deci-
sion alone at the crossroads of a story that would have to remain his
own: he will be alone, all alone to bear the responsibility of his path:
hand himself over or deliver himself either to the hands of power or into
the hands of other hôtes, the nomadic shepherds. Once the Arab has
made his decision, Daru will be alone, all alone, feeling “his throat knot
. . .” and then, “with heavy heart, seeing the Arab walking slowly on the
road to prison.”9 When he returns to his classroom after this implac-
able trial, a terrible verdict awaits him: “Behind him on the blackboard,
among the winding French rivers, sprawled the clumsily chalked-up
words he had just read: ‘You handed over our brother. You will pay
for this.’ Daru looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invis-
ible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had
loved so much, he was alone.”
This is the final word of this story. I’m not going to draw here, impro-
vising rapidly, the political lesson of this narrative, if there is one, only
one, one which isn’t as terribly ambiguous as the hospitality thus staged.
That would require endless glosses. I simply wanted to highlight the
following point, that brings the questions of hospitality and translation
together, following Farid Zahi’s path: the double solitude of protago-
nists who aren’t p rotagonists—the host and the guest, the hôte and his
other, is reflected in the initial untranslatability of the title: “l’hôte.” An
untranslatability from out of which a story [histoire] gets started, a story
is called, a story as the interminable translation of the untranslatable
that has remained untranslatable: the whole (hi)story.
VIII. Remainders, Traps, and Mirrors
As this is the last time, after this final round table, that I’ll be speaking
here, let me simply express my gratitude to you once more, from the
bottom of my heart. I want to thank you for having invited me here,
for having associated me with this work w hich—and I’m sure I’m not
the only one who thinks this—deals with very serious stakes with all the
attention and vigilance they deserve. I don’t know what will come of
these exchanges, but I was very aware of something I can’t pin down,
9 [Translator’s note] Ibid., translation slightly modified.

86 What Comes
something really intense moving discreetly through the discussions,

beneath our discourse at times. In the most active and ultimately infinite
sense of what we just called “translation,” you “translated,” you began
to let interpretative differences come face to face. They were all charged
with inheritances toward which—dare I say it despite my admitted and
attested incompetence—all the philosophical, religious, cultural, ethical,
and political stakes converge: all the forces and trends permeating the
Arabo-Islamic world through all the borders between this world and the
“plurality of worlds,” to use this expression again.
As I listened carefully and gratefully to everything you were saying,
I tried ceaselessly to translate what I was hearing, all the while taking
it as it came, at face value, if you like (the density and tempo of these
talks don’t always make this easy). Yes, at the same time I also tried
to translate what was indirectly or obliquely said into the spectrum (in
the physical sense) of possibles, into the virtualities of what our world
is; and to draw out in fuller strokes the ethics, politics, and strategies
that were being sketched here. I think we were able to see many such
things being heralded here, sometimes incompatible or in conflict with
each other. Fortunately we managed to be civil, but many wars passed
like furtive silhouettes through some of our discussion, only to vanish
rapidly.
One of the most precious things I think I’ve grasped (precious because
I could now begin to understand them and to take the measure of a
wealth of inheritances, an open plurality) is that this difference was
also a chance before what comes. And before what distresses us. If, as
I believe, something happened for us here the importance of which it is
difficult for us to measure, that something must continue; I suppose this
is our common wish: that all this should extend well beyond these walls.
We won’t be able to program what will come of all this, but today,
however virtual it remains, it is a chance.
I would now like to try to answer the question that was posed con-
cerning citizenship. I’ll have to do it quickly and, once again, too sche-
matically. I tried to touch on this issue in some recent texts, and this
again is an aporia to which I lay claim. Between two traditions, two
inheritances and two injunctions. As always, the responsibility to be
taken goes, as it were, through the ordeal of aporia.
Of course, the claim to citizenship, national citizenship or world
citizenship, is something that should never be renounced. There are
today enormous masses of human groups, populations that are not even
exiled citizens, or even subjects with an identifiable status as “state-
less.” These are people who do not even have the rights traditionally
bestowed on citizens. It is important for the state to intervene so that
87
they may become citizens, subjects of a nation-state. Likewise, I believe

we should never renounce the figure of the “world citizen,” the tradition
of “cosmopolitanism” in its double filiation (the Stoics, a certain Pauline
retrieval of Abrahamic or Ibrahimic hospitality, the Enlightenment with
its at least apparent “secularity,” and its Kantian moment, “the right to
universal hospitality,” etc.). On the international level, this is a contract
between world citizens beyond national belonging. Of course, these two
citizenships are necessary, and they must be made to agree with one
another. But at the same time, a new “international” ought to ally singu-
larities that are not defined by citizenship, and thus by the state, if only
through a contract among all the states in the world, an international
inter-state law (the political ground, then, of cosmopolitanism as such).
These international alliances, solidarities, and associations would have
a bearing beyond citizenship and the still genealogical, national, phallo-
patriarchal schema of fraternity or clan such as it continues, often in a
seemingly innocent and generous fashion, to determine the figure of the
other as my neighbor: my fellow human, the other man. This amounts to
saying that it would be necessary, according to the places and moments
of the same strategy, to ally two “politics” of the “political,” that is, two
politics of the State, no matter how contradictory they may seem. On the
one hand, we must uphold state sovereignty as well as the rule of law that
protects the citizen and resists certain economic powers whose capacity
for capitalistic concentration tends both to overwhelm states and (in a
paradoxical and perverse fashion) gives rise to these reactive national-
isms. But on the other hand, and at the same time, we must resist the
reason of state as a last instance—if I may put it like t hat—where states
are subjected de facto both to these capitalistic powers and, in the very
idea of their sovereignty, to an international law that calls for profound
revision. In that case the state is no longer a categorical imperative of
“politics”—if we may still use this word to describe an order no longer
modeled on the state. The movement of revision I’m referring to will
take a long time; institutions of public international law are today based
on a concept of state sovereignty that has a history. To deconstruct this
history does not mean to disqualify it, but rather, to think its historicity
and therefore its perfectibility. This “deconstruction” must be rigorous
and cautious. Because, let’s face it, it risks being dangerous, but without
this danger nothing would ever happen. It is very dangerous because
certain nationalist, “integriste,” fundamentalist movements (notions
among which we must carefully distinguish within every culture and
every “religion”) brutally contest international law: either as law that
is European, all too European, or else as secular rationality. Without
giving in to a facile anti-euro-centrism—which I often find suspect—I
88 What Comes
believe it’s necessary for international law to be founded anew, so as to

open new possibilities beyond the current figure of citizenship. I believe
in historicity and, therefore, in the infinite perfectibility of law.
That’s why it happens that I sometimes talk about democracy to come
as a democracy that will no longer be essentially founded in citizenship.
This is extremely paradoxical or even inadmissible for political scientists
who usually don’t think twice about using the word “democracy.” What
would a democracy mean not grounded on the citizen-subject? And why
keep the word “democracy” in order to name what is no longer simply
commensurate with the state and the citizen? This question is more
serious than it seems. It would take much too much time and too many
precautions to justify here why I nonetheless use and reaffirm the legacy
of this word today.
What was said on a more personal note went straight to my heart,
particularly what touched on my Algerian vestiges [restes], what
remains [reste] Algerian, remains with me and keeps me Algerian. I was
so overwhelmed by what was given to me there that I dare not add a
single word to it.
As to psychoanalysis, let me up the ante and suggest not only that it will
have always been colonial, from the s tart—its entire history being struc-
turally marked by colonial o verdetermination—but that every culture is
colonial. We don’t even need to refer to etymology to understand this.
A culture forms, stabilizes, or puts down r oots—always at a depth that
is determinate and therefore limited, and only for a time—through con-
flicts of force, phenomena of imposition and hegemony, and therefore
also of repression and suppression. In recalling this minimal and harsh,
universal self-evident fact, we ought to be vigilant not to drown out
the specificities of modern “colonialist” violence and certain kinds of
economic, military, and linguistic brutality that we think of when we
use the words “colonialism” and “coloniality.” Nevertheless, we must
take note of the general law that makes these modern forms possible: a
culture is always the coercive and hegemonic imposition of one group,
one force, one drive, or one phantasm on another. There is always some
coloniality at work. And consequently also resistance. A resistance that
is always ambiguous, in its very legitimacy. So, for example, for better
or for worse, a resistance to psychoanalysis has arisen in Europe and in
parts of the world that were initially “colonized” by psychoanalysis, to
say nothing of the rest of the world where psychoanalysis didn’t gain
a foothold. We are dealing with these resistances inside Europe, even
within the psychoanalytic institution and in places into which psychoa-
nalysis has never penetrated. The stakes of this future of psychoanalysis
are major for Arabo-Islamic cultures.
89
Just a word on the difference alluded to between Algeria and

Morocco. True, psychoanalysis didn’t happen in Morocco in the same
way as it did in Algeria. In Algeria, there was a structured school with
a hegemonic discourse, in a different political and economic context.
In Morocco, if I understood aright, the scene was both more open to
psychoanalysis, and more heterogeneous and multiple. This historical
chance apparently not only made the reception of psychoanalysis pos-
sible, but also affected its discourse or practice in turn, on the basis of
what was said vis-à-vis the relation to language. In a way, the welcomed
hôte found itself somehow affected by the welcoming hôte. This would
make for a breach that we must of course enlarge, without hiding from
the fact that resistances always come from both outside and inside.
I won’t be able to take up seriously the difference between philoso-
pher and journalist [chroniqueur: columnist, chronicler]. You must have
noticed how I voiced in several instances some doubts as to the possibil-
ity of writing a history of the lie. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of such a
history, if we remain with the hypothesis, tells us two things for certain:
were this history to be written down— which I doubt— neither phi-
losopher nor journalist could do so. In my view, they are both equally
incompetent to write such a history. The philosopher (qua philosopher,
of course) because he would relegate the lie, as well as error, to a second-
ary role within a history of truth or reason, as with madness; and the
journalist (qua journalist), because he would tell stories, and, when one
tells stories, the only way to make it a story is to structure it in terms
of the presumption or the horizon of a u nified—non-aporetic and non-
narrative—true concept of lying. What I provisionally called “History
of the Lie” calls for an entirely different, deconstructive discourse that
would, in my view, be neither philosophical nor narrative. This wouldn’t
be a narrative of another kind, it would be another history and another
way to think history, in which history as either event (Geschichte) or
scientific discourse (historia rerum gestarum) would be impossible and
unthinkable without at least the possibility of a lie. But it would be
better for me not to go any further so rapidly on this subject.
As concerns history as inheritance, the issue of the appropriation of
the origin was raised at a certain point. This is indeed the way inherit-
ance is generally, and quite legitimately, conceived of. But it seems to me
that the paradox of inheritance—like the paradox of the idiom, meaning
the proper, the appropriated, or the appropriable— is that we can’t
appropriate this right: in a strange way what we inherit in the end is the
inappropriable. I take on a legacy with which, in a way, I can’t do just as
I please, as if it were my thing. My responsibility toward it obliges me to
answer for and before what is not, and never will be, myself—nor mine.
90 What Comes
This is also the law of idiom and of translation. The paradox of idiom,
even for someone who speaks her or his idiom idiomatically, what
people call too readily a “mother tongue,” is that it can’t be appropri-
ated. The heritage does not belong, no more than does the idiom. One is
under its law and one tries to be appropriate with respect to it, but one
cannot appropriate it. Nothing is more inappropriable by me than my
proper name, for example.
Heritage isn’t a thing, some thing one receives wholesale. One must,
within finitude, interpret it, “filter” it as we allow it to overtake us; it’s
a gift that I can neither grasp nor comprehend fully, and it is under this
law that we speak here, be it about idiom, origin, proper name, etc.
Here I’m getting to what I’d like to say to Mohamed Bennis: namely
that fidelity is de rigueur, no doubt, but I can submit myself to the law
of the other only insofar as I can’t appropriate what the other leaves or
gives me—with all the paradoxes of the gift we have already mentioned.
The translation of the word autrui remains extremely difficult even in
the so-called Western languages, whether English, German, or Italian. I
would like to agree with what was said, but in order to manifest both
more hope and more despair. We must never give up deconstructing the
instruments of deconstruction. Were there a single axiom for “decon-
struction” itself, only one axiom for only one deconstruction (which I
doubt), it would be this one: given that deconstruction puts heritages
to work, it is an inheritor, an inheritor of languages, logics, sentences,
sequences, and idioms. It must translate itself into other idioms, or
translate other idioms. It’s then quite necessary for it to substitute one
instrument for another without having any qualms about letting this one
go for the sake of borrowing that one, when strategy demands it. An
infinite task: deconstruction is not a method, it endlessly relaunches the
critique of the instruments of critique. And the very idea of “critique.” I
have often tried to show that deconstruction, which is not negative in its
essence or its process, isn’t simply a “critique” e ither—a simple modern
version of the great tradition or idea of “critique.”
Deconstruction is what happens—it’s “who or what arrives” [c’est
“qui arrive”], the arrivance of the event and the arrivance of the arri-
vant. That—which arrives, obliges us to change instruments. We must
indeed give up certain instruments, not in order to put them away, but
to change emphasis, to put some of them to one side at a given point,
letting others come to the fore and then withdrawing them, that is, we
must displace the conceptual topoi and the places of emphasis: in a
given situation, in a language or country, at a certain moment of one’s
“personal history.” This is an open process which we must neither stop
at a given point, nor give up to that philosophical view called relativism
91
or empiricist skepticism (I tried to clarify this point elsewhere). Infinite

regression lies in wait for us at each moment—as it must, and that’s fine.
The trap was also named. And the mirror. Yes, they’re there, they
will always be there. Should we wish, by way of a suitable method, to
avoid infinite regression, the trap or the mirror at all costs, we must
then change everything into a calculable insurance system: and nothing
will ever arrive again. And no one. For something or someone to arrive,
we must accept the risks and dangers they bring, even if we must still
negotiate, calculate, and reckon with the incalculable. The greatest
dangers must be faced so that something may happen or that someone
may arrive. That makes a lot of “musts,” I certainly hear them, a bit
impatiently. But does erasing the letters of these words suffice to get rid
of them? I doubt it. So perhaps it’s better to admit these “musts” and try
to think them all the way through to their vertiginous origin.
This leads me directly to Mohamed Bennis’s question: of course,
translation ought in itself to be a deconstruction. I subscribe to this
proposition for a deconstructive strategy and I agree on what a trans-
lation can make come about or make “arrive” in its target language
[langue d’arrivée]. This is an important criterion. Sometimes it is indeed
better to have a translation that is literally less faithful (in a certain
“literal” sense of fidelity that calls for ceaseless reappraisal), and that is
more productive, giving rise to certain effects in the target language. But
I couldn’t agree more that we mustn’t grant an absolute privilege to this
criterion of transformation of or productivity in the target language, at
the expense of “fidelity” in general. Here it’s a matter of another fidelity,
and a transaction between two fidelities. In spite of everything, it seems
to me that translation should try to be as faithful as possible, not for the
sake of calculable precision, but because translation calls us back to the
law of the other text, under its injunction and signature, this other event
insofar as it has already happened prior to us and for which we must
answer as inheritors. It is there, to be translated, prior to and in front
of us: a heteronomy which means that I accept the law of the other not
by passively obeying it, but by countersigning, by inventing a signature
that, in my language, in a completely different situation, in an incom-
mensurable language, very strangely allies with the other and subscribes
to the law of the other. Without this, there is nothing left of the rela-
tion to the other text as such. At stake is a tension between, on the one
hand, the strategy of transforming the target language and, on the other
hand, a quasi-sacred fidelity (we would have to come back to the sense
of the sacred in its relation to the so-called original text). This tension
is at work in every translation, it is translation itself. A “good” transla-
tion succeeds “better than another” at doing the maximum possible to
92 What Comes
respond to these two imperatives at once. The maximum: because there

is always an economy in play. The most powerful translation is the one
that struggles and manages to accomplish these two imperatives as much
as possible, paying off as best it can both debts at once.
Concerning the sacred, let me say briefly that I can understand the
concern that inspires the remark that says: “no, Arabic is not a sacred
language; it is a profane language since it has been confiscated from
me.” I think that I understand the current political implications of this
thought. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t want to be too eager to subscribe
to it, not because I hold Arabic to be the only sacred language or a
language more sacred than another, but because I believe that there is
some sacredness, an irreducible process of sacralization in every idiom,
in every experience of literality. Translation is an experience of sacred-
ness. Perhaps even the genesis of sacredness. In translation I am dealing
with the other’s body, the body of another’s text, which I touch where I
have no right to touch it—I mean affect it by changing it in what it is. I
must (duty, categorical imperative) still let it be as I comprehend it, come
toward it and change it into my language, all the while leaving it intact
in its own. In its own in my own, at home in my home. What a translator
never has the right to do is to change, touch, or retouch the original text.
A simple phenomenology of the experience of translation teaches us
this much: every idiom to be translated is sacred, the letter is sacredness
itself. Naturally, there is, in the relation between the literality of Arabic
and the Quran, a specificity of this sacralization. Yet this also happens
in other religions. In the Muslim religion, this sacredness of language
is particularly untouchable, but it is at the same time the paradigmatic
phenomenon of what happens in every religion, in every language, and
in all translations. There are several ways of evaluating, analyzing, and
treating the relationship between the sacred and the profane, in accord-
ance with historico-political strategies and situations, etc. It is each time
a difficult and singular choice. There are many ways of profaning sacred
language and playing with this sacred/profane relation. This is one of the
political responsibilities that every one of us must take up with language
in particular. What is the sacred? If language is sacred, who will be the
guardian of this sacredness? A head of state, a man of the church, a lin-
guist, an academy, a poet?
This experience of sacredness is inseparable from testimonial experi-
ence. For several years now, in the seminar I’m devoting to this issue,
we’ve had to return time and again to these questions of proof and
testimony. The sacred runs between the two. Testimony is what goes
beyond proof. The witness is the one who says: “Take my word for
it, I swear to tell the truth. Believe me, you will never have certain and
93
originary access to what I think when I say this, whether I am lying or

telling the truth.” All speech thus comes forth in the dimension of this
promise and this sworn faith, even and especially when it betrays them.
Here, before every religion, we are in the order of faith, the faith that
constitutes the social bond in general as being-with and as un-binding
simultaneously, as we said, relation without relation. One will never be
able to produce an objective, impersonal proof, and one totally foreign
to faith, of the fact that one is lying or telling the truth. That’s not pos-
sible. Lie is not error, nor does it consist in simply saying something
false, any more than sincerity consists in saying something true. To lie
is to say something other than what we think, while promising to speak
the truth, so as to convince and mislead the other. Yet every liar will
be able to say: “I didn’t mean to lie. In good faith I thought that it was
so.” Or again: “This isn’t what I meant to say in good faith, language or
rhetoric betrayed me; I hadn’t understood the question or the context,
etc.” It will be impossible to have an originary intuition of what goes
on inside the other’s head (I refer you to the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian
Meditations).10 I can prove nothing on this subject, in the strict sense
of proving. Obviously, in the history of law, one has always tried to
use or articulate testimony as proof. It’s very complicated, but I believe
this is an unsurpassable heterogeneity and that the consequences of it
are enormous. Knowledge, and even proof, are grounded on testimony.
The order of proof in mathematics, in physics, and even in penal law
where there are pieces of evidence and exhibits, presupposes a stratum
of faith. But upon this abyssal foundation, a powerful building process
will have constructed the conditions of an old and solid autonomy. We
call this reason, knowledge, science, technology—philosophy. And this
isn’t worth any less than the abyss of faith above which it rises; it merits
protection, it merits to be inherited. This is perhaps the singular inherit-
ance that we must both contemplate and deserve. But is it possible to
merit inheriting?
10 See “Fifth Meditation. Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being as

Monadological Intersubjectivity,” in Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012).
Chapter 4
Message from Jacques Derrida

(2002)
“Message de Jacques Derrida” originally appeared in Le Voyage en

Palestine, edited by Russell Banks, Breyten Breytenbach, Juan Goytisolo
et al. (Castlenau-le-lez: Editions Climats, 2002), 123–36. This essay
incorporates the previously published “Nous?” that appeared in Un très
proche Orient. Paroles de paix, edited by Joëlle Losfeld (Paris: Dada,
2001), 52–5.
Responding to the request of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish,
this is Derrida’s message for/to the Delegation of the International
Parliament of Writers convened in Ramallah in spring 2002 in the
Occupied Territories.
Dear friends,
Without neglecting any difference or any singularity, I would like to
speak here to those, Palestinians or Israelis, who in my eyes have the
exemplary courage, having taken all the risks, of publicly testifying,
in speech, in writing, in political and poetic engagement, about the
necessity of opposing the forces of death, terror, and armed repression,
wherever they might come from, from an instituted State or a State on
the way to institution.
At the time when I must, with so much regret and sadness, push back
for a few weeks the meeting that I was dreaming about, allow me to
address you an affectionate and warm greeting from the bottom of my
heart. Before speaking about the promises and hopes that I would like to
share with you today, Palestinians or Israelis, allow me to mention some
memories among those most dear to me, and which we doubtless have
in common, at least some of you, and I.
I would first like to recall, so that things are clear: every time that I
have come to this land, over the course of these last years, I have made
Translated by Caleb Salgado.

Message from Jacques Derrida (2002)
95
a point of demonstrating my solidarity and friendship by meeting not

only Israeli intellectuals, writers, and colleagues, but also Palestinian
intellectuals, writers, and colleagues.
I insisted on this demand each time with some of my Israeli hosts. It
was heard by them during the conference that was held in Jerusalem in
1988. In a now published text, Interpretations at War, I would declare
this, that you will permit me to recall:
Two years ago at an international conference in Jerusalem [see “How to

avoid speaking,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, 19871], I had suggested
that the planned meeting for next year have the theme “The Institutions of
Interpretation.” This title was selected and the meeting took place in Jerusalem
from June 5th to 11th, 1988. The conference’s preamble—for this I kept the
English title which is difficult to translate—states in what spirit I participated in
this meeting—as well as others simultaneously, in the occupied territories, with
Palestinian colleagues outside their universities that were—and remain—closed
by administrative decision. (July 15, 1988)
Why is this report necessary?
Like others, my talk will consist in a group of interpretative hypotheses
about, precisely, institutions of interpretation. Given this, it will be, certainly
and de facto, in relation to an institutional context that today determines, here
and now, a university, a State, an army, a police force, religious powers, lan-
guages, peoples or nations. But this de facto situation calls for interpretation
and responsibility as well. Therefore, I did not believe I should passively accept
the fact of this situation. I chose to deal with a subject that allows me to ask at
least directly, and as prudently as possible, some questions about what is hap-
pening here and now while confronting head-on the themes of this conference’s
program (“The Institutions of Interpretation”). But if, between what I am going
to say and the violences already happening, here and now, the mediations
should be numerous, complicated, and difficult to interpret, if they call for as
much patience as vigilance on our behalf, I will not use them as a pretext to wait
and be silent before what demands an immediate response and responsibility.
I had already opened up to the organizers of this conference about my
concern. I shared with them my wish to participate in a conference to which
Arab and Palestinian colleagues would be officially invited and really associ-
ated. This meeting’s organizers, Professors Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser,
shared my concern. I thank them for the understanding that they have demon-
strated in this regard. With the necessary seriousness, I want to proclaim my
solidarity with those who demand the end of all violences in this land, as well
as those who condemn the crimes of terrorism and military or police repres-
sion, and with those who hope for the retreat of Israeli forces from occupied
territories, the recognition of the Palestinians’ right to choose their own repre-
sentatives in negotiations that are more necessary than ever. That will not be
able to happen without an incessant, informed, and courageous reflection. This
1 [Translator’s note] Translated by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 2 vols.

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007–8.
96 What Comes
reflection should lead to interpretations, new or not, of what I had suggested

two years ago as the title for this conference that was being prepared at that
time, the “institutions of interpretation.” But the same reflection should also
lead to interpreting this dominant institution that a State is, here the Israeli state
(the existence of which, it goes without saying, should henceforth be acknowl-
edged by all and definitively guaranteed), its prehistory, the conditions of its
recent foundation and the constitutional, juridical, political foundations of its
current functioning, the forms and limits of its auto-interpretation, etc.
As evinced by my presence here, this declaration is not only inspired by a
concern for justice and for friendship for Palestinians and Israelis. It also means
a hope for the future and respect for a certain image of Israel.
I am not saying that, of course, in order to artificially adjust my remarks to
the externality of some circumstance. The call to such a historical reflection, as
agonizing as it might appear, as courageous as it should be, appears to me to be
inscribed in the most decisive context of our meeting. In my eyes, it forms the
very meaning and urgency of it.2
So it is this demand that had led me, in 1988, in conditions that, as you
know, were already not easy, into occupied territories where, while
their university was closed on the order of Israeli authorities, I could be
received privately in the President of the university’s house by a good
number of Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian colleagues and intellectu-
als. I recall with emotion and acknowledgment a long afternoon over
the course of which they spoke of, described, analyzed their suffering for
me, all the kinds of restrictions that were imposed upon them, whether
it be about passports, freedom of movement, pedagogical activity, or
political expression. The names of Ramallah and Bir Zeit are therefore
dear and familiar to me. Because there was also, in 1998, ten years
later, an unforgettable visit to the University of Bir Zeit. Concerning the
generous hospitality that was offered to me, I remember not only the
visits of the campus, laboratories, sites for archives, and reflection on
the law in the process of constitution and r econstitution—so many signs
announcing and preparing this new State’s foundation that, everywhere
in the world, we are all calling for. I also remember that after my lecture
on hospitality and citizenship, long and enthralling discussions of politi-
cal philosophy continued, beyond the conference hall of the Institute for
Democracy, with colleagues and friends, among whom was Professor
Azmi Bishara who I was fortunate enough to see again not long ago
in Paris, right here, to speak with him, hear him, and support him in
the unjust ordeal that he was going through while being prosecuted in
Israeli courts and threatened with losing parliamentary immunity. On
2 “Interpretations at War,” in Phénoménologie et politique, Mélanges offerts à

Jacques Taminiaux (Brussels: Ousia, 1989).
97
my return, four years ago, by way of a kind of postcard that has been
published in a book entitled Counterpath, I jotted down some memo-
ries. It was postmarked from Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Ramallah, January
11, 1998. Please allow me to reread a few words from it today:
I wonder how I permit the cohabitation in my body, through a sleepwalking

spectrum, both millennia of amnesic love for each stone, each death from
Jerusalem, and my “difficulties” (that’s an understatement, and they are not
only and so seriously, so radically political) with so many Israelis, over the
background of my innocent culpability, which is precisely the last link that
remains indestructible in me, perhaps with every Jewish community in the
world, there where it remains infinitely guilty, and far beyond Israel, of the
violence inflicted on Palestinians, and my alliance with the Palestinian cause,
and my affection, my boundless compassion for so many Palestinians—and
of Algerians [. . .]. This is a huge subject for meditation about which I can
tell you nothing in a letter. The conference on pardon again, in Jerusalem,
another but actually the same one as in Poland on the eve of Auschwitz, then
a kind of “show” that they organized in a big auditorium in Tel-Aviv (2,000
people were there to hear me speak about “The foreigners that we are” in
English!). Relatively peaceful debate; there were Palestinians there, as well as
in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. A conversation with the Fathers of tomorrow (I
will describe it to you in my office) before dancing all night with friends. [. . .]
The next morning, very early, on the way to Palestine, the crossing through
checkpoints near Ramallah. The Palestinian friend told me while smiling bit-
terly that these checkpoints, these shibboleths of the Israeli police, make the
entry into Jerusalem more difficult than it was prior to the “Peace process.”
Remarkable discussion at the University of Bir Zeit (Institute for Democracy)
after the lecture (on hospitality and citizenship), with Palestinian colleagues
who are suffering and resisting on all fronts: the current Israeli govern-
ment, the “Palestinian authority,” Islamist fundamentalist, international
conspiracy. Absolute confidence, this time, I breathe, we avoid no subject,
from the originary violences, the expulsions, the refugee camps, to arrogant
Netanyahu’s sinister curse. But also their impatience before the Palestinian
power’s insufficient democratization [. . .]. The last day, a filmed interview in
Jerusalem for the Yad Vashem archives, the museum of the death camps [. . .].
And then I also like to recall the meeting with Mahmoud Darwish at
the Sorbonne a few years ago, accompanied by his lifelong friend Leila
Shahid.
More than ever, the mission of the International Parliament of Writers
commands us to be close to you, all of those who, whatever the past
errors and crimes may be, irreversible crimes, incommensurable, uneras-
able, understand that assuming the responsibility of no longer prolong-
ing them, no longer accepting their repetition, no longer allowing them
to burden the heritage and the future of those who are born or choose
to live on this land.
More than ever, the mission of the International Parliament of
98 What Comes
Writers commands us, by all the means at our disposal (cities of refuge,
paper publications or on any other media, translations, etc.), to let the
voices be heard of all the witnesses, writers, professors, journalists,
men and women of speech and writing who take the risk, in Israel and
in Palestine, of resisting all the dogmatisms, all the fanaticisms, all the
logics of war and death.
As I have said and written more than once,3 and I’ll repeat it here,
the conditions of foundation of the State of Israel remain a hive of
painful questions for me. Even if one takes it as a given that every State
is founded, that every foundation itself is founded, without being able
to justify itself by definition, in violence, I have a thousand reasons to
believe that it is better, all things considered, including in the interest of
the majority, including Palestinians, including other States in the region
(or the world), to consider this foundation, despite its originary violence,
to be henceforth irreversible—on condition that good neighborly rela-
tions are established either with a Palestinian State endowed with all its
rights, in the fullest sense of the term “State” (at least for what remains
of it today, of this full sense and of sovereignty in general), or, within
the same “sovereign” and bi-national “State” with a Palestinian people
liberated from all oppression or from all intolerable segregation. I have
no particular hostility in principle with regard to the State of Israel, but
I have almost always judged severely the Israeli governments’ politics
with respect to the Palestinians. My compassion and my solidarity
with the inhabitants of this land and with the historical victims (Jewish
and Palestinian) of the atrocities of this time do not deprive me of the
right to criticize all governmental policies, including those of the great
powers, before and since the foundation of the State of Israel, and at
times including the policy of the Palestinian authority. This concern for
justice, I dare think that it does not betray any of the memories and the
most respectable traditions, I mean those that claim to be inspired by
the Abrahamic cultures and religions, Judaisms, Christianities, Islams.
It would be to disfigure these memories and these traditions to reduce
them to ethnocentric phantasms or fundamentalist intolerance. It would
be on the contrary to honor them to invent an as yet unheard of path in
order to live together rather than fight over Jerusalem.
It is in this spirit that I was recently asking myself and wondering
under what conditions “we” can still say “we.” It was in a collective
volume for “one of Sapho’s ideas,” A Very Close Orient: Words of
3 Again recently in De quoi demain, Dialogue with Elizabeth Roudinesco (Paris:

Fayard, 2001), pp. 192ff. Translated by Jeff Fort as For What Tomorrow . . .
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 118ff.
99
Peace.4 I would like to read this testimony. It was as if predestined to

this meeting. The question mark that, in the title, follows the word we?
is certainly marked by a sometimes desperate suffering, an interrogation
torn between life and death, but also between war and peace. But this
question mark is also, going further than interrogation, coming from
further away than it, the sign of an invincible hope or promise, salva-
tion, the call and wish that I wanted to entrust in these words: in these
words for you, for us.
In saying “courage,” “goodbye,” “see you soon” to you, I would
like to believe that we will be together, we, to share the sign of life
that this text speaks about and that I will allow myself to read again in
conclusion.
We?
To start, start over (let’s start over) is risky, it is sometimes impossible,

we know, by saying “we.” The most fairly, the least unfairly as possible.
We, despite all the differences of the world, and the most respectable
ones, we, let’s assume so, let’s call ourselves so, there would be many
of us in the world, and from all corners, to have exhausted, exhausted
ourselves doing so, all argued discourse, all armed rhetorics for saying
and predicting, as to Israelis and Palestinians, but also to them, address-
ing ourselves to them, the just, the most just, the least unjust possible.
We tried yesterday and the day before yesterday to go as far as we can
in the analyses (historical, philosophical, theological, political, juridical,
ethical, etc.) to judge equitably the respective and asymmetrical, incom-
parable, responsibilities. On the one hand, the violent foundation of
the State of Israel, with the complicity of so many powerful States, the
prolongation and ongoing development of a kind of colonial and archaic
oppression that the Shoah cannot justify but that also forbids it to be
reduced to any other example, etc. Over there, terrorism, a politics just
as guilty on the part of many other Arab countries in the region, States
that are so undemocratic, an overwhelmed Palestinian Authority, barely
democratic and irresistibly tempted or constrained by upping the ante,
etc. We could and should continue on this path, refining and further
complicating these reminders— whereas on both sides the suffering
remains incalculable and incomparable.
We know, however: it is too late now for advancing arguments any
4 Un très proche Orient: Paroles de paix, dir. Sapho (Éditions Joëlle Losfeld/Dada,
2001).
100 What Comes
more, even if it is never useless. The harm is done. It goes on and as

necessary as they may be, always never-ending, as enlightened as they
may be today by the “new historians” in Israel, these analyses remain
impotent—and inadequate faced with the urgency that makes our heart
ache.
We think then that it is on this limit, in this place of exhaustion that
we must start, start over. And this, this limit, the inside or the bottom of
the heart. Of what we decide to call the heart once more, appealing to it.
It is there that the “we” passes reason and reaches the heart, it is there
that it speaks to the heart without diplomacy, from the heart, from heart
to heart, the heart’s reason, its political reason.
We are sure of it: the heart, which means nothing else, is on the side of
life. It is what we call the heart in order to appeal to it. It is the heart that
ought to inspire the law, here and now. If the word “people” still had
a meaning (I somewhat doubt it), it would be to be sought on the side
of this reason of the heart. That should also dictate, without waiting,
its law to the political, juridical, military, diplomatic initiative. To the
governors, the deciders, the diplomats, the generals, the “religious,” the
colonists. The heart, which will always be on the side of life, says to us
it is better to live, and live “together,” be it separated, than to die by the
other’s hand in hatred.
We want to recall this simple commonplace, that every Israeli, every
Palestinian must feel, like us, every day, in their heart. Clearer than day,
as long as we turn to it, that is to say toward the other, this self-evidence
calls for practical, diplomatic, strategic solutions, etc. Without precon-
ditions. One must repair, as much as possible, everywhere where there
is still something “reversible,” one must repatriate as much as possible,
one must transfigure the most legitimate grievances, one must share the
land especially, one must share what one names, in an old language that
it would be urgent to change, sovereignty (in particular over Jerusalem
and the so-called “places of worship” or “holy places,” these places
where one must, if it is truly of Abrahamic faith that one intends sin-
cerely to speak, search for an inspiration for peace and not war). One
must treat together the needs that we know to be in common and recip-
rocal. Irreversibly. One must treat the irreversible differently. Without
losing one’s soul.
On the contrary: it may be time to make the future by means of some
irreparable harm if one does not want to not lose again, with one’s soul,
one’s life.
Chapter 5
The Future Anterior of the Archive

(2002)
“Le futur anterieur de l’archive” was originally published in Questions

de l’archive, edited by Nathalie Léger (Paris: IMEC, 2002), 41–50.
Remarks made at a colloquium held in 1999 at the Collège inter-
national de philosophie on the occasion of the Collège dedicating its
archives to IMEC. Derrida’s remarks post-date Mal d’archive and are
dated April 27, 2000.
Must we archive reflections on the archive? And where to begin?

As it happens, by strange coincidence, I was invited several days ago
by friends from ITEM [Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes], who
work on genetic criticism, to speak about my relations with “things”
from the archive, the library, manuscripts, etc. Obviously, I developed,
making due allowances, pretty much the same “dramaturgy” that Michel
Deguy spoke of just now as to what is saved and what is not saved. So
I was driven, quite predictably, to emphasize during this session the
extraordinary technological transformation that our generation has
witnessed. I believe there has never been a generation in the history of
humanity that, in the space of thirty to forty years, moved from pen and
pencil to mechanical typewriter, then electric typewriter, then computer,
then to all the means of telecommunication and tele-recording of our
era. This technological situation has also clearly marked the time of the
Collège [Collège international de philosophie].
For my part, I do not have the calm or serene view of the archive
that Raymond Roussel’s expression, quoted by Olivier Corpet, might
connote. I have a much more troubled and tragic relationship to this
question of the archive. First, and I will begin with this point, because
the question of the archive is a place of great violence. Michel Deguy
recalled the etymology of the word. If I can make reference to my little
Translated by Jacob Levi.

102 What Comes
book Archive Fever, I will recall in my turn that from its beginning,
I posed the question of where this word comes from and its political
implication. The word comes from arkheîon. In ancient Greece, the
arkheîon was the place where those who had power decided which
public documents to preserve. Those people therefore possessed a power
of legitimation, of legitimating decision, regarding what would be saved
or destroyed.
Obviously, there is no archive that does not imply this power of
destruction, selection, or exclusion. Conservation does not happen
without exclusion, it is an eminently political power that is exer-
cised as a power of legitimation. It is not only political power in the
strict sense—which concerns the properly national documents of the
City—but above all the power of legitimation of a work. For example,
by preserving the archive of the Collège, we have already carried out a
gesture that implies that this archive deserves to be preserved, consulted,
and protected: this is an extraordinarily symbolic and very powerful act
of legitimation. Of course, since we have been witnessing the ever more
remarkable development and institutionalization of the IMEC [Institut
mémoires de l’édition contemporaine], we have seen that many French
writers and intellectuals want to be received by the IMEC. It has become
a sort of Academy. At first, people prowled around this new institution
with some unease, wondering what it really was, what its relationship
was with the Bibliothèque Nationale, etc. Now we see that IMEC holds
a remarkable power of legitimation, and a certain violence is exercised
in that.
From the simultaneous perspectives of technology, technological
becoming, and political violence, I would like the remarks that I will
now put forward to be considered in two registers: on the one hand, if
you will, on the basis of personal examples, some of which connect me
to the Collège and others which do not, and on the other hand, accord-
ing to a generality well beyond my own personal case.
I recall—and here we are immediately in politics—that just before
the creation of the Collège, a commission which I had the honor of
coordinating was charged by Jean-Pierre Chevènement with studying
its conditions of possibility. We began, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre
Faye, Dominique Lecourt, and myself, by consulting, sending a tremen-
dous number of letters throughout France, and receiving hundreds and
thousands of letters. I quickly began to ask myself what would become
of all this, whether the Collège would live, survive, and also what would
become of all this correspondence in which we saw the entire French
intellectual community, philosophical or not, ask questions, raise objec-
tions, and paint kinds of portraits, pictures of France in the early eight-
The Future Anterior of the Archive (2002)
103
ies. I had no idea—though I already knew, as anyone could know—that

it was the future that would decide what these letters will have been.
I think that the concept of the archive is not turned toward the past,
contrary to what one might tend to think. Memory is the question of
the future, and for the archive, it is always the future anterior that, as it
were, decides its meaning, its existence. It is always in this temporality
that archives are constituted.
Very early on, when the Collège was created, after the drafting and
delivery of the Report, and in the Report itself, we asked ourselves the
question of what the Collège would or should do with new technologies
for communication, the powers to record and broadcast its activities, at
a moment when we couldn’t give a clear answer to the question whether
the Collège was a purely private or public institution. This is an ambigu-
ity that remains from a legal and statutory point of view. The Collège,
like the IMEC, is a private association according to the 1901 law, but
we knew from the beginning through the initiatives that I mentioned
earlier—namely when Chevènement asked us to write a Report in order
to help us establish an international college that would be nonetheless
private, etc.—that an ambiguity had taken root. I believe it is not for-
tuitous that the IMEC and the Collège have grown closer because they
share this ambiguity, which obviously grants them a certain freedom as
well as a singular responsibility.
So, as early as this Report, we wondered whether the Collège shouldn’t
do something which was not done regularly if at all in the university: to
offer televisual or radiophonic teaching, to produce “performances,” as
it were, of pedagogy and research, which would constitute their own
archive in the very moment, which would not only reach auditors and
participants beyond the circumscribed site of the Collège, but which
could also, by means of these audiovisual recordings, constitute a living
archive.
One of the things that distinguish archiving today from the past is that
we can now archive the living image and word, and consequently, keep
and preserve not simply written traces which do not seem contempora-
neous with the act, with present experience, but also audiovisual traces
which at least maintain the phantasm of the living presence of the person
who is speaking, or who offers themselves (or is offered) to be seen or
heard.
Of course, even though the Collège recorded certain sessions from its
beginning, it was not done in a systematic or exhaustive way. Whence
the question, one of many questions posed, of what was retained and
why. Why did we record this rather than that? Why can the Collège
do something that is not commonly practiced in the u niversity—for
104 What Comes
example, depositing its archives at IMEC—when, to my knowledge,

there are no archives from other universities at IMEC? Naturally, this
will not ease our relationships with universities, because there has
always been a tension between us, a competition stoked here and there
by this person or that. But if the Collège henceforth deposits its archives
at IMEC, this will pose new questions.
The single word deposit [dépôt] would deserve our attention because,
as you know, IMEC is not the owner of the archives entrusted to it: the
Collège, like all those who deposit archives at IMEC, remains the pro-
prietor of what it thus hands over. Hence, it is a passage. The archives
are provisionally at IMEC since we have the right to remove them. So
on the one hand, we can ask why the Collège can be thus welcomed by
IMEC whereas other institutes are not, and on the other hand, we can
ask what the relationship is between this provisional deposit, statutorily
provisional and reversible, and the fact that at the C ollège—another
remarkable trait of this institution—there is only passage. It is therefore
the archiving of what happens [se passe], what passes and who passes
in the Collège, which is reversibly deposited at IMEC. These are very
singular things.
I also recall that very early in the history of the Collège, when I was
the director in its first year, we had a meeting a bit analogous to this one,
with representatives of the National Archives, on the rue des Archives.
We discussed the problem of archives in general, and the National
Archives—not those of the Collège, it was still too early. And what
was revealed, as we could have predicted, was that while the National
Archives were initially the place for the conservation and protection of
official administrative documents, naturally they developed bit by bit
to the point that one lost sight of the limits of their original mission to
preserve and protect. One saw, as it were, the specters of agents of the
National Archives begin to go so far as to record the totality of what
was said, seen, lived, etc., in the country. That is, they were dedicated to
doubling the totality of French experience, to make of it the archive of
the absolute knowledge of French consciousness. They were supposed
to go to villages, question survivors, the old, the less old, the young,
then the even younger, and then all public events and, why not, private
events where the limit between public and private becomes increasingly
problematic. One saw looming a rather monstrous responsibility for
the National Archives, whom the state could ask, if it had the financial
means, to record the totality of what is taking place in the national terri-
tory. For that matter, could it be limited to national territory? There are
also French people abroad, so it would be necessary to take account of
the entire francophone u niverse . . . a t least Francophone. . . .
105
Keeping things in proportion, the same question arises at the Collège:

what will we keep? What will we archive? What will we deposit? I don’t
exactly know the contours of what is being given to IMEC but I am sure
that, despite the trust that I have in its actors, authors, and decision-
makers, there is a violence of filtration, selection decisions that will need
to be reinterpreted. If the interpreters of the future who will have to
evaluate these archives are vigilant, they will need to evaluate not only
the content of the archive, what we will have given them, but also the
archival gestures: Who decided to record this? Why was that excluded?
For whom did we keep nothing? etc. In other words, they will need to
examine all the mechanisms of censorship in the broad sense, if you will.
“Censorship” is not the right word because its strict sense covers a much
narrower field. I am speaking of everything that will have been reduced
to silence or invisibility among things that will have been important,
which can have been important for the Collège.
What, for example, is a course or a seminar? Naturally, a seminar
is public, and the Collège decided that all its seminars would be open.
Nonetheless, this public openness of all the activities of the Collège does
not prevent a seminar from maintaining a semi-private dimension. There
are things that take place in it which do not belong to pure public trans-
parency. Furthermore, most of the seminars were not recorded. There is
therefore already an enormous mass of things that will have counted a
great deal in the Collège which were not recorded.
Nor will we have recorded—to this I can bear w itness—the discus-
sions of the collegiate assembly, its debates, disagreements, or conflicts.
Some very complicated things have taken place in the Collège of which
there remains no trace, or at least nothing that even comes close to
resembling the vivid memory that certain of us have. Now, what is being
outlined at the moment is the “sculpture” of the Collège, for tomorrow
and the day after. I don’t know what this “sculpture” will be, but we
will need (or would have needed) to know what it will have cost, and
how it will be paid for at the price of a great deal of destruction and
amnesia. As soon as there is archiving, not only the past but also the
future is in play. The act of archiving, which is supposed to preserve, is
also an act of amnesia. Amnesia is at work in the memory that is kept,
in the act that consigns. In archival consignment, there is as much forget-
ting (active or not) as there is memory.
To close, I would like to say a few words on the subject of the future,
precisely. As it happens, and this does not seem fortuitous to me, the
fifteen years of the Collège’s existence have coincided with an acceler-
ated development in the techniques of archiving and virtualization.
These make it so that today in the developed industrial world, we are
106 What Comes
moving closer and closer, and faster and faster, to what they call in
the United States “virtual universities,” that is, places where capitalists
invest a lot of money. They appeal to the old traditional universities,
with their professors, their facilities, their resources, etc. These inves-
tors propose, for example at Yale, installing telecommunication and
televisual devices in traditional classrooms so students can enroll, take
classes, receive grades, etc., from anywhere, sometimes even outside of
the United States.
I know that this is not absolutely new, but we are witnessing a power-
ful and effective acceleration of the process.
Now, from its start the Collège wanted to be an international insti-
tution, attentive to the implementation of these new technologies.
Consequently, if it wants to be true to its international and internation-
alist mission, and not merely reactive to these technological possibilities,
the Collège must participate in this development of tomorrow’s virtual
universities, knowing that the work, research, and teaching that is pro-
duced in this virtual space will immediately be sites of archiving. Here,
production is simultaneously the institution of reproducibility. There
will be no need to search through drawers to find letters: production will
be immediately reproducible, which will clearly displace the concept and
structure of the archive.
IMEC is also in a situation where the archive that it contains, today
composed essentially in paper form, nonetheless accommodates other
kinds of media that will make communication with other archival insti-
tutions in France and abroad possible and necessary, by e-mail, televi-
sion, and through what I would call the sharing of archives. Whereas up
to now it was the exclusive custodian of its archives, even if it wasn’t
their owner, IMEC will have to share its archives with other institutions.
I will take a personal example that also ties me to IMEC. It concerns
my American history, to which I allude with some degree of bashful
anxiety, not because it is me who is in question, but first to clarify that
what connects me to the University of California at Irvine is neither a
question of sales nor dollars. All of this is absolutely free [in English],
as they say there. It happens that in this university where I had taught
for many years before IMEC existed, they proposed to accommodate
my archives. Now I really like this university, these are friends, so I
responded: why not? But it was already a selective gesture because it
was a question of including and integrating my archives into the so-
called “Special Collections,” which were to assemble and select texts,
lessons, and archives that had a connection to what is there called
“critical theory” or “literary theory.” The whole complex history of
this American concept (“theory”) is thus involved in the project of the
107
archive, which thus retains its mark. Those responsible for this archive
(librarians, teachers) have asked a certain number of well-known profes-
sors in the United States to donate their archives in order to have a place
for research in literary “theory.” It is thus in this already interpreted and
over-interpreted space, in this selective, over-interpreting space that my
archive would go—and indeed will go. I already felt guilty that I was
giving them my archive, not because it was for free, but because it was
going to the United States, when Olivier Corpet proposed that I share
things between IMEC and Irvine, to invent a better system so the archive
can be both here and there, precisely, so the same documents can be
simultaneously and immediately accessible here and there, in California
and in Paris. As a result, thanks to the technological means I’ve been
talking about, the sharing of the archive becomes possible, and it no
longer has a single place.
Whereas until now, like the concept of the political, the concept of the
archive was connected to the stability of the topos, it is henceforth no
longer connected to the territorial rootedness of an institution. There are
institutions, there always will be, with all the problems that they imply,
but their local placement is no longer assured as we previously might
have thought.
The Collège can and must not only participate in this movement, but
must also be a site for reflecting on what comes along with this deter-
ritorialization of the political, to sovereignty over archives, to property,
and to the institution . . .
April 27, 2000
Chapter 6
Derrida, Mandela, Politics,

and the Market (2000)
Invited by Amis de l’Humanité à la Courneuve, Derrida reflects on

“Politics is not merchandise.” Extracts of the conversation by Jean-Paul
Monferran, “Derrida, Mandela, la politique et l’Algérie,” were pub-
lished in L’Humanité, November 17, 2000.
Friday, November 17, 2000

Invited by Friends of l’Humanité at La Courneuve, philosopher Jacques
Derrida had accepted to reflect around the proposition that “Politics
is not a commodity.” Here are some extracts—among other possible
ones—from that exchange.
Algeria, the past that does not pass, oblivion, pardon and the impossibil-
ity of pardon, the “work of truth.” [. . .] These are so many themes that
philosopher Jacques Derrida unpacked during a discussion at the booth of
the Friends of l’Humanité which was one of the highlights of the the Fête.
Constructed around the theme “Politics is not a commodity,” this exchange
began as a “prolongation” of Louisette Iguihlarz’s testimony on torture. All
sorts of “news”—starting with the effects produced by “the call of twelve
public figures for the condemnation of torture during the Algerian war,”
but also the recurring debate about the relations between the “market” and
“politics”—led us to publish broad extracts of this dialogue in large part
repeating those published in the Spécial Débats de la Fête.
Jacques Derrida: I would like to try to mark a certain continuity between

this session and the—distressing—one we just attended. I participated in
it in my own way, with the memory of someone who is both French and
Algerian. I was born in Algeria. I lived there without leaving until the
age of nineteen and, just now, I heard names resonate which were names
from my childhood— El Biar, Ben Aknoun . . .—but that have also
Translated by Caleb Salgado.

Derrida, Mandela, Politics, and the Market (2000)
109
become the names of a monstrous archive: these are places where torture
took place. For me, there are two El Biars, just like there are two Ben
Aknoun high schools—the one where I did my studies and the one that
is now denounced as a place of torture: carried out by the French police
and army, and by the Algerian police and army. Without going into any
kind of settling of accounts here, I would say in passing that a serious
history of the communist parties—of the PCF, the PCA—of the Algerian
War remains to be written. Then, the overwhelming testimonies that
we heard bring me closer to South Africa and Nelson Mandela. While
he was still in prison on Robben Island and was beginning to negoti-
ate with white power for the passage to a post-apartheid democracy,
he had decided with his interlocutors upon the creation of a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission before which all those who had been victims
of abuse and torture would come to testify for truth—not for venge-
ance, but for truth. Well, many women did not believe that they had to
testify because, as they said, the simple fact of testifying represented a
repetition of the trauma that they had undergone: for example, for some
militants of the ANC, of having been systematically called a “whore,”
of having been denied the status of political militants, and of having
often been r aped . . . To come and display these s cars—in the literal or
figurative sense—was something impossible for them. There had to be
created a commission “of sexual difference” in which the women could
deal with this problem: some of them became high-ranking politicians
in the new South Africa, without being able to testify, either publicly or
even in their own family. There is quite a striking analogy with what we
heard a minute ago concerning torture inflicted on women in general
and on female militants in particular . . .
How can one develop the idea that “politics is not a commodity” in rela-
tion to and with Mandela and South Africa?
JD: Naturally, it is a bit facile to want to think beyond the commodity

and beyond the market: ethics beyond the market, politics beyond the
market . . . Quite often, one must unflinchingly recognize the subtle laws
of the market in politics, sometimes even in the most generous politics.
When one reconnects Mandela’s story as a red thread—if I might say—in
the history of the struggle against apartheid and of the end of apartheid,
one notices that it was incessantly necessary to go beyond the laws the
market, and sometimes—even for M andela—to bend before them. As
you know, apartheid began after 1945 as State racism, as a modern
and final form of State racism, at the very moment when the concept
of “crime against humanity” had been defined and proclaimed after
110 What Comes
World War II. The international complicities that allowed this regime
to endure were, in many respects, complicities dictated by the market,
by all kinds of markets. First of all, the precious metal market, gold,
etc., the arms m arket—for example, for a very long time France showed
weakness concerning this regime in this field. There was, in a way, a
sort of balance tied to the market. On the other hand, during the cold
war period a certain stabilization of apartheid was consolidated because
what the international community feared above all else from the West
was that the Communist Party with which Mandela was allied would
take power in South Africa and that, as a result, the balance would be
broken, the Soviet Union being, along with South Africa, one of the two
biggest producers of gold and precious metals. C onversely—and still
following this question of the m arket—if apartheid ended, if the ANC
and the militants around Mandela’s struggle won, it is doubtless due,
of course, to a heroic battle and extraordinary sacrifices, but it is also
because at a certain point, the international pressure that had sustained
apartheid was overturned, quite simply because from the point of view
of the market, analysis showed that there were benefits to be had in
apartheid ending. And therefore one could make a totally economic
reading (in the broad sense), both of the establishment, the stabiliza-
tion, and the end of apartheid. Naturally, this study, as necessary as it
may be, would be insufficient in accounting for what we should speak
about, which is, Mandela’s journey and everything he went through,
brought about, overcame, in absolutely exemplary fashion. What is
extraordinary in the person of Mandela, is that from the start of his
militant action, he simultaneously embodied, adopted, and mastered
the language of Western law. He was a lawyer. He started by defend-
ing Blacks from South Africa who could not be defended under normal
conditions—and then, during different trials over the course of which
he pleaded his own case, he set the judges’ own model and conception
of justice from the English tradition against them by showing that they
were ultimately betraying their own laws and conscience. And that the
specular reflection that he proposed to these judges and to their allegedly
“British parliamentary” conscience not only reflected the truth of what
English justice should be, but produced a real internationalization, a real
universality that white power, in fact, was hiding or repressing. Mandela
did not stop setting the colonial enemy’s own conscience and law against
them. In this manner, he practiced what a certain American tradition
calls “civil disobedience:” not obeying the law in force in the name of a
higher law. First, Mandela fought this fight in a non-violent manner, a
bit on the model of Gandhi who also had a whole South African history.
And then, when it was obvious that white power was not respecting its
111
own laws and continued to violently repress those who opposed them-
selves to it, he made the decision to turn to violence: Mandela explained
himself convincingly about this in many writings . . .
To continue with Mandela, I noted in the text that you delivered at

UNESCO last November, something that refers to what you just said
about the universal. You said essentially: “it is necessary to go beyond
a kind of neither nor. Neither cultural relativism which in the name of
a critique of Eurocentrism would result in rendering any notion of the
universal unthinkable, nor doing without this critique of Eurocentrism
to the extent that it is a question of rigorously analyzing all the genea-
logical traits that lead the concept of world back to its European filia-
tion.” Is Mandela not in this tension of what you elsewhere qualify as
an “impossible task,” which is to say, a rethinking of the universal by
moving beyond this “neither nor”?
JD: Instead of tackling this problem head-on, I’d like to bring it back
to its South African dimension and to the example or exemplar of
Nelson Mandela. He constantly referred both to the Anglo-American
parliamentary tradition and to that of his ancestors. And often, he tried
to show that, in the population that he came from, there were non-
European democratic traditions that could very well be embodied in the
fight he was fighting. So he was trying simultaneously to universalize a
European model of origin and a non-European one. Now, in terms of
the European history of apartheid, one should know that apartheid as
State racism is a European production. I am not saying that racism in
general is European: it exists in all cultures, European or not. But the
project of inscribing apartheid in a rationalized manner into the State
constitution is a European phenomenon that originates in a history of
the “liberation” (I put the word in quotes) of South Africa from English
power, by Calvinists who were conscious of being the true chosen
people and who felt emancipated from the English colonial power. And
it was they who, decolonized and with this anti-colonial memory, fab-
ricated this monstrosity of State racism. Mandela set another ferment
of European universality against this incontestably European importa-
tion. He wrote a very beautiful text in which he explains that, for him,
it was a question not only of liberating his people from apartheid, but
also a question of liberating Whites from it, and that it was a question,
in a never-ending process of liberation, of liberating the oppressors as
well to the extent that they had become enslaved by their own ideology
and interests. When, in his memoirs, Mandela recounts the first years
of his childhood, he says, “I felt free, I thought I was free, and then,
112 What Comes
very quickly, I realized that we had been expropriated of everything,

that we no longer had freedom, and that is when the never-ending
process of liberation began.” I met Mandela at the end of his term,
when Desmond Tutu was preparing to give him the report of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela sensed very well what was
happening—market logic, once again we come back to the question of
commodity—, that is, that one had to compromise with what is called
globalization, the market economy, and that it was necessary not to
question certain property laws, certain market laws in South Africa. The
result, fatal or not, is that today, unfortunately, despite the huge change
and huge progress of these recent years, the face of the South Africa of
yesterday and the day before yesterday has not completely disappeared.
And it is still there in the effect of the inscription of this country in the
global market economy.
You just mentioned Truth and Reconciliation. What is indeed striking

in this process, is that the victims themselves are not exempt from giving
accounts. There is no—or no longer a—“higher interest” to give the
victims the right to do whatever they please against the executioners.
JD: The history of this commission is more complex. There had been
some precedents in Latin America where, in order to allow for reconcili-
ation, the labor of mourning, there had been attempts to create commit-
tees that judged, amnestied or not, those who had been guilty of abuse.
But nowhere, prior to the South African example, had a committee of
this scope with such ambitions been created. Initially (as a result of
common agreement between the former white power and the new demo-
cratic power), the point was to make it so that retributions did not para-
lyze the country. And then, the committee’s major responsibility—here I
am taking up your question of E urocentrism—was confided in Desmond
Tutu, a respectable man in many ways, but who is an Anglican priest,
and who introduced the Christian language of forgiveness [pardon]
and repentance, which incidentally caused a lot of objections. One
must also recall that one of the great merits of the Constitution of the
new South Africa—which could serve as a model for all of the world’s
democracies—is that it preaches reconciliation, which was never written
into any Constitution; and that it recognizes women’s rights and takes
into account sexual difference, but also that it grants an official legiti-
macy to eleven languages. Before the committee, one could come to
testify in one’s own language, even if the predominance of English
simultaneously imported the predominance of a certain philosophy, a
certain ideology. I remember two extraordinary testimonies of women,
113
reported in a book—Country of My Skull—that is unfortunately not

translated [into French], a book written by a poet, Antje Krog, who had
attended many of the committee’s sessions as a journalist. One of these
women, in front of the torturer who was present and who had hounded
her husband or son, said: “I forgive you.” Desmond Tutu said that
this committee’s purpose was not to punish or acquit, but to make the
truth—and that echoes what was said a minute ago: what is important is
the truth, and that one knows what happened. The other woman, asked
“Do you forgive?,” responded in protest: “An institution, a state, a jury,
a committee do not have the power to forgive. I alone could forgive, and
I will not forgive.” I’m not sure I can translate what she meant. I imagine
at least two things: first, an institution does not decree pardon, which is
a unique case of personal conscience. But she could have meant some-
thing else as well: only the victim, that is, her husband who died under
torture, could have considered whether or not to forgive. Which raises
the question of knowing who has the right to forgive: reconciliation for
national interest [raison d’État] is one thing, forgiveness is something
else. Who has the right to forgive, and in the name of whom? This ques-
tion can be asked about South Africa, but also about all the extermina-
tions or violence that have marked our time . . .
You said: “In South Africa, there was concession to the market.” Was
this inevitable?
JD: It is a problem that cannot be asked one day, just once. At the
time when he came to power and in the conditions you are aware of,
Mandela had to make a decision. He could not both found a post-
apartheid regime and decree a socioeconomic revolution that would
have removed this country from the global market. It was not possible.
His successor has the same problem. It is a process. The question being
asked today and for the future, is that of knowing whether, through the
process of struggle against the market, or a certain state of the market,
South A frica—but also Europe or France—will and should be able to
transform this market. I do not believe that one can be simply “inside”
or “outside” the market. The question is knowing what one needs to do
in order to regulate the market, what the State can do, and what one can
do beyond the State. So the question is not “market” or “not market,”
but how to negotiate a transformation of the market through political
struggle. For now, the fact is—coming back to South A
frica—that things
are not going well. Financial but also human capital are fleeing. Whites
tend to leave, poverty produces what it always produces, and many signs
indicate that South Africa today is not responding to the hopes that we
114 What Comes
all nourished when a number of us were fighting for the end of apart-
heid. Before meeting Mandela (for the first time, two years ago), when
we had collected a number of texts, For Nelson Mandela, in 1983–4,
I did not imagine that a few years later he would be freed and that the
new South Africa would emerge. This acceleration consists naturally, in
part—we come back to the question of the m arket—in the ANC’s heroic
struggle but also, for another part, in the profound transformation of the
geopolitical market wherein all of those who supported South Africa’s
white regime realized that it was not good, either strategically nor eco-
nomically. It was then that pressures were exerted on the white power
that gave up little by little. And it was the United States that was the
first to exert this pressure! The struggle against apartheid was stronger
in the United States than in France. Here, it was only the Communist
Party and l’Humanité that c onstantly—I want to pay them this tribute
from the position of a certain externality—reminded us about the South
African situation . . .
Listening to you, I thought of this phrase of Marx: “History always has

more imagination than those who make it” . . .
JD: I do not know what one can mean by “imagination.” It is only

in retrospect that one understands what happened through individual
actors. That is why Mandela, who is an immense person for whom I
have infinite respect and admiration, was, despite everything, only one
of the many militants. There were extraordinary people around him
who worked in the same direction, and who, moreover, at times did not
follow him. If one looks closely at “imagination,” at Nelson Mandela’s
individual genius, one notices that at such or such m oment—while he
was in prison and he was already negotiating with white power—he
was all alone in his own party in taking an initiative that his lifelong
comrades disapproved of. When he accepted, after a quarter century of
horrifying suffering—I saw what Robben Island was!—taking the risk of
entering into negotiations, of trusting the word of his white interlocutors
in a certain sense while his comrades remained anxious, one can ask:
What is the part of imagination or Nelson Mandela’s individual genius,
and what is the part of the laws of the market’s gravity, of geopolitics?
It is very difficult to say. I always try, in these moments, to be fair, to not
forget, at the moment of the coldest analysis of historical laws—which
are always more or less laws of the market, because the market is not
only the commodity, it is everywhere there is exchange, where there is
language, where there is diplomacy. Even reconciliation is a market.
Not forgiveness: when one forgives, one does not expect a “thank you;”
115
“thank you” [merci] (merces, in Latin, that means commerce, exchange)

is a word from the market. Reconciliation is a transaction made for
accommodating, for continuing to live together, in order that things
remain or become possible again—so, in the coldest analysis of the
laws of the market, one has to try to be fair and to allow for destinies
such as Nelson Mandela’s who was, throughout his whole life, both a
great and lucid calculator who took into account a very large number
of the elements of the market, precisely, and who, at a given point, did
something that perhaps exceeded the context of the economic, politi-
cal, or mercantile market. Mandela, coming obstinately back to him, is
both someone who knew how to break with belonging, i.e. the context
that was also the context of South Africa dominated by the ideology of
Anglo-Saxon parliamentary democracy, as well as the belonging to his
own party, to the community of his comrades in arms, as well as recall-
ing another belonging: his origins, affiliation, the multiple belongings of
South Africa itself . . .
A speaker in the audience: You said something that touched me, that
you transmitted through Mandela’s mouth: this idea—very right, very
beautiful—that one has to free the oppressor. That reminds me of a
sonnet by Shakespeare: “Those who have the power to do evil and
choose not to do it, they are the true lords of the universe.”1 If the world
is not a commodity, do you have any idea what it could be?
JD: I believe that we must deconstruct sovereignty, the State’s political

horizon, and not simply in order to found a globalized market. The State
is still useful for resisting certain forces of the market, for regulating these
forces of the market, but breaking with this logic of state sovereignty is
necessary. Obviously, I referred to two figures of the commodity. On
the one hand, what one commonly understands by commodity, which is
the thing that one sells and buys, that one exchanges for money, that is,
the mercantile, economic market in the strict sense. On the other hand,
commodity in the broad sense—everywhere there is exchange, every-
where there is gift and counter-gift. The “thank you”—as I said—is, in
a certain sense, a commodity; gratitude reinscribes the gift in exchange.
As a result, everything is a commodity! The most generous language is
caught in the logic of exchange, which is to say in the circle of restitu-
tion. So, what is not a commodity? Well, what quite unpredictably and
improbably interrupts this exchange: giving without expecting a thank
you, or forgiving without expecting acknowledgment. And at the limit,
1 [Translator’s note] Paraphrase of Sonnet 94.

116 What Comes
even without knowing it. Because when I know that I am giving or when
I know that I am forgiving, I am already in the process of thanking
myself through my very consciousness of what I give and for the fact
that I am forgiving. So, to go beyond commodity, you have to lose the
very awareness of the commodity, you have to go beyond knowing and
consciousness. It is difficult. It is a sort of excess. . . .
Part II
Interviews
Chapter 7
Jacques Derrida, Thinker of the Event

(2004)
“Entretien avec Jacques Derrida—penseur de l’événement.” An inter-

view conducted by Jérôme-Alexandre Nielsberg and published in
L’Humanité, January 27, 2004.
With its riches of some eighty books, the oeuvre that Jacques Derrida
has been developing over almost forty years is recognized throughout
the world today as one of the essential components of our philosophical
modernity. “Deconstruction,” according to the very name the thinker
has given his work, exceeds the strict frames of academic study: his
books bear just as much on the work of Plato as they do on international
law. One watchword, however: being open to what comes, to the future
to-come, to the other.
Over the last fifteen years or so, your books have given rise to a recep-
tion situated on the political terrain. According to their guiding threads,
as works that deal here with a politics of friendship, there a politics of
memory, or further still a politics of hospitality. How do you understand
this term “politics”?
Jacques Derrida: I will of necessity respond in a schematic and tel-

egraphic manner. If, for a long time now, my texts were considered
politically neutral—while my commitments to the left were k nown—it
is because, attentive as I have always been to politics, I did not recognize
myself, I did not recognize what I wanted to think within the domi-
nant political codes. Which explains why I never, for a long time, said
a word against Marx, nor for him, while remaining very attentive to
what was happening on that front. Nevertheless, I was working to make
possible a political discourse that would take into account the labor of
Translated by Philippe Lynes.

120 Interviews
deconstruction I had begun. I was waiting to be able to articulate my

work of deconstruction upon a renewed concept of the political. That
only seemed possible to me at the moment when the purportedly com-
munist regimes collapsed and everyone proclaimed the death of Marx.
I thought this was unfair and politically nefarious, dangerous. Specters
of Marx is a complex book, stratified and deliberately contradictory, not
only “for” Marx but, in its own way, also for Marx. Since then, I have
endeavored, in all kinds of books, lectures, and teachings, to reflect on
what a New International could be, taking into account globalization,
the new problems of sovereignty and everything that, within the politi-
cal, is in the process of breaking with the course of the political: the ter-
ritorialized nation-state, essentially bound to a national rootedness. It is
a question of rethinking not politics but the political itself, and interna-
tional law, and power-relations, to analyze and understand American
hegemony, the critical and paradoxical weakness of the U.S.A. also, the
new sites and ways to organize political movements, the heterogeneity
in motion of the anti-globalist forces that I am convinced will be decisive
for the future of the “world.”
In reading you, another specter seems to haunt your texts, and some of
the concepts you develop such as justice, forgiveness, and hospitality:
that of ethics.
JD: In a certain manner, ethical questions have always been there, but
if one understands ethics as a system of rules, of moral norms, then no,
I am not proposing an ethics. What in fact interests me are the aporias
of ethics, its limits, notably around questions of the gift, forgiveness, the
secret, witnessing, hospitality, the living being—animal or not. All that
involves a thought of the decision: the responsible decision must endure,
and not only pass through or surpass an experience of the undecidable.
If I know what I have to do, I do not make a decision, I apply a knowl-
edge, I deploy a program. For there to be a decision, it’s necessary that
I not know what to do. Which doesn’t mean that one must renounce
knowing: one must be informed, know as much as possible. It remains
that the moment of decision, the ethical moment if you will, is independ-
ent from knowledge. It is at the moment of the “I don’t know what the
right rule is” that the ethical question is posed. So, what concerns me
is this an-ethical moment of ethics, this moment when I don’t know
what to do, when I have no available norms, when I must not have any
available norms, but when I must act, assume my responsibilities, take
a side. Urgently, without waiting. What I do is thus just as an-ethical
as it is ethical. I interrogate impossibility as the possibility of ethics:
Jacques Derrida, Thinker of the Event (2004)
121
unconditional hospitality is impossible, in the field of law or politics,

of ethics itself in the narrow sense. However, it is what must be done,
the im-possible: if forgiveness is possible, it must forgive the unforgiv-
able, that is to say do the impossible. To do the impossible cannot be an
ethics, and yet it is the condition of ethics. I try to think the possibility
of the impossible.
“The possibility of the impossible,” you say. This is also how you define
deconstruction. But one cannot help but think, in reading this today, of
the terrorist attacks suffered by the United States in September 2001.
In a forthcoming book, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, you write that
what happened threatens at once “the system of interpretation, the
axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts and evaluations that are supposed
to allow one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like
‘September 11’.”1 On this subject, one might want to bring you back to
one of your own questions: “can one blow out the eardrum of a philoso-
pher and still be heard by him?”2
JD: I’d perhaps want to blow out the eardrum of philosophers, without
for all that blowing up philosophy. What matters to me must be under-
stood from a philosophical place. But let’s leave that aside. To return to
the concrete question you ask, I indeed think that the concepts that have
been employed, that have been instrumental in interpreting “September
11th” are concepts that are henceforth subjected to a radical deconstruc-
tion. Not a theoretical deconstruction, a practical deconstruction. It is
in progress, it is as I often say “what comes (about)” [ce qui arrive]: the
pretext of the war on terror does not hold, since the concepts of war and
terrorism themselves no longer hold. The secretary General of the UN,
Kofi Annan, emphasized this during a session: we have no rigorous defi-
nition of international terrorism. And the concept of war involves, in the
old European law, the State-related figure of enemies and the declaration
of war from State to State. Which is not the case. Neither international
war nor civil war. Even the concept of “partisan war” proposed by Carl
Schmitt loses its pertinence. The “terrorists” of the al-Qaeda type repre-
sent neither an (actual or virtual) State nor the will to found or restore
1 Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le Concept du 11 septembre (Paris:

Galilée, 2004); trans. Giovanna Borradori as Philosophy in a Time of Terror:
Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 93.
2 Jacques Derrida, Marges: de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), iii; trans. Alan
Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), xii.
122 Interviews
a State. In what happened on September 11th, there is nothing of the

sort. The entire conceptual apparatus we usually use no longer works:
neither war nor terrorism, as we said. But conceptual oppositions such
as national/international, civil/military themselves no longer work. We
must reforge all of that. Which, I have no illusions here, will be long,
gradual, with great inequalities in its development, as they used to say
in the Marxist rhetoric. The end of the State, the extinguishing of the
desires of sovereignty are not for tomorrow, but they are working our
world over. What is unpredictable, as always, is the time, or rather the
rhythm of these ineluctable mutations.
The United States is a harbor that has often welcomed you. Are there
specific reasons for this?
JD: I have traveled a lot, perhaps too much, not only to the United
States. I would like to be distanced from this “American” image; it
doesn’t correspond to reality. Only to the desires and interests of a
certain few. One should also mention all the continents and all the coun-
tries in Europe. The first year I spent in the United States, in 1955–6,
was a matter of happenstance: a grant received thanks to the director
of the École Normale to go to Harvard. Then I returned to the United
States ten years later, invited to a conference by René Girard. The pres-
entation I gave there, a critique of a certain structuralism, went off like
a bomb over there. People saw in it, rightly or wrongly, the first sign
of what Americans have since called poststructuralism. I was reinvited,
three times in a row, at three-year intervals. In the end, the universities
of Yale, then Irvine in California, and New York asked me to give semi-
nars of a few weeks, once a year. I have never made lengthy stays in the
United States; most of my time is not spent over there. That being said,
the reception of my work has indeed been, as elsewhere, more generous,
more attentive in the United States; I have encountered less censorship,
fewer barriers and conflicts than in France, it’s true. Even if deconstruc-
tion has been the object of pitched and raging battles in the United
States, the debate has been more open than in France, allowing me more
leeway. In the end, thanks to or because of the history of the American
university, people often work a lot there, work well and very quickly. In
any case in the milieux that are most familiar to me.
Another country has marked your existence: Algeria. You were born
and grew up there. Since your departure on the Ville d’Alger in 1949,
this country has gone through multiple social and political crises. What
is your relation with this first land today?
123
JD: First a clarification, then an anecdote. The clarification: until the

age of nineteen, I had never left my village in the suburbs of Algiers,
El Biar. I did not know metropolitan France at all. The anecdote: in
1996, the Parlement des écrivains, of which I am the co-founder and
vice president, devoted, in Strasburg, one of its sessions to Algeria.
Before the debates, the speakers were gathered in a salon. Beside me,
a young Algerian woman. She asks me: “You really lived in Algeria,
on the rue d’Aurelles-de-Palladine?”—Yes. “Number 13?”—Yes. “Me
too.” She introduces herself and I find out that she is the daughter of
the Algerians to whom my parents had left their apartment when they
had to leave Algeria. Since then, she too had to leave Algeria, due to
her dual condition of being a woman and an intellectual. This young
Algerian woman had been raised in the house I grew up in, she had
come to this session of the Parlement des écrivains to testify to the
Algerian drama, the assassination of intellectuals, the Islamist fanati-
cism that was ravaging the country. I live today in this painful contra-
diction: Algerian at heart—with all the sufferings and nostalgia that
entails (I call this my nostalgeria)—living in a country, France, which
is also mine, observing, from here, the painful history of independent
Algeria.
Barely arrived in Paris, in your preparatory classes at Louis-le-Grand,

your first interests were Sartre and Bergson. However, your trajectory
has considerably distanced you from these two philosophers. How
would you see them today?
JD: It is true that Bergson was a marvel for me and, as he was for my
whole generation, Sartre was a great figure of the philosopher and
committed writer. How do I see these interests in retrospect? I don’t
renounce them. If I had the time today, and the freedom to do so, I
would like to reread these two thinkers and teach them. But despite
paying homage to them—even in my deconstructive analyses, I try to
show my love of the t exts—I would not do so without reinscribing them
in their originality and limitations, those of a French philosophical and
institutional tradition. There are, in Bergson and Sartre, ways of doing
things, ways of reflecting and writing that one finds neither in German
nor in English, and that are totally foreign abroad.
There were then, among your friends, important philosophers and

writers: Althusser, Levinas, Blanchot, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jean-
François Lyotard. Now, friendship needs dialogue. Can your work be
read as a dialogue with these friends?
124 Interviews
JD: Yes. But the fact that there is a d ialogue—a word I don’t use very
much—does not mean that the books are, one by one, responses or ques-
tions to these thinkers. There is more of an address than a dialogue, in
fact. Some of my texts have been addressed more specifically to these
friends, but without becoming unreadable to others. As is the case with
my books on Blanchot or Levinas. Same with Specters of Marx, which
I cannot explain without bringing to light, exhuming the entire history
of my relation to Althusser, that is to say not only to Althusser but to
those around him when we taught at the École Normale Supérieure,
at the Althusserian moment of an era, to what was being done with
him, around him at the time: Reading Capital, For Marx, works I
didn’t always agree with, but without being hostile to them. Likewise
for Deleuze. I felt very close to Deleuze’s theories, but I never would
have written them like him: we proceeded and wrote in such differ-
ent manners. I was, for example, very impressed with his essay on
Nietzsche, but I couldn’t follow the Anti-Oedipus. I also didn’t agree
with what he said about Artaud, even if I shared his interest in Artaud.
I said this to him, by the way; our personal relations were always very
amicable, as with Lyotard. It was the same type of proximity. All of this
is very complex, we would need several issues of L’Humanité for me to
explain myself.
One of your aphorisms has become famous: “There is nothing outside

of the text.”3 If everything is text, everything is affected by the method
of deconstruction. Doesn’t this go against this diversity of the systems
of understanding the world that the evolution of the sciences brings to
light?
JD: I began almost forty years ago with a reflection on writing, the text.
What mattered to me in the beginning, despite the fact that I became a
“philosopher” by profession, was literary writing. What is it to write?
I wondered. What happens when one writes? To answer this, I had to
broaden the concept of text and attempt to justify this extension. “There
is nothing outside the text” does not mean that everything is paper, satu-
rated with writing, but that every experience is structured like a network
of traces referring to something other than themselves. In other words,
there is no present that is constituted without referring to another time,
another present. The present traces. It is tracing and traced. I broadened
3 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 227; Of

Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974), 158.
125
the notion of trace to include the voice itself, with the idea of reconsider-
ing the philosophical subordination since Greek antiquity of writing to
speech (logocentrism), and to the living present of the voice (phonocen-
trism). That being said, despite the necessity of critique, deconstruction
is not a critique. It is neither an evaluative judgment nor a procedure
of disqualification. No more than it is, incidentally, to use your word,
a method. The idea of method supposes a set of regulated procedures,
preconditions for the experience of reading, interpretation or teach-
ing, along with a certain mastery. Even if some have detected a certain
recurrence—
that’s what the word “method” points to, isn’t it?—of
deconstructive motifs, deconstruction is not a method. Neither “cri-
tique” nor “method,” while also passing through a history or genealogy
of the ideas of “critique” or “method,” deconstruction allows for inter-
pretations of reading, writing, of transformations of the general text
that are so many events. They make new things happen, surprising for
the very one who experiences them. There is no mastery of deconstruc-
tion, only the encounter of “something else,” someone else who each
time dictates the singular law of a reading, who issues the order to make
yourself responsible, to answer for your reading. However, if nothing
escapes the text, the text cannot be totalized. Because of the very struc-
ture of the traces it is composed of, that open onto something other than
themselves, the totality cannot close itself. This excludes totalization,
closure, the completeness of the text, and in the same blow the value of
the system. Deconstruction is not a system, any more than it is a philoso-
phy: it interrogates the philosophical principle. It is a singular adventure
whose gesture each time depends on the situation, the context, notably
the political context, of the subject, of its rootedness in a site and a
history, and which allow it, in a way, to sign the deconstructive gesture.
In the end, time is at the heart of your thinking, yet you do not propose
a philosophy of time. One instead has the impression of dealing with a
philosophy of the event. Would death then play a pivotal role therein,
allowing you precisely to articulate time and the event?
JD: You are right, there is no philosophy of time in what I have written.
But there is no philosophy of the event either, or of death. There is no
philosophy of anything whatsoever. I indeed began by working through
the philosophical heritage concerning time—Kant, Husserl, Heidegger
especially—and the privilege of the present in the thinking of time.
Common sense tells us that everything is in the present: the past and
future are announced in modalities that are always those of the present,
of the living present. It is this obviousness that I have tried to complicate
126 Interviews
a little. This question of time has remained active throughout all my

work. However, what you say about a privileged attention to the event
is correct. It has become more and more insistent. The event as what
arrives and what happens [ce qui arrive], unpredictably, singularly. Not
only “what” arrives [“ce” qui arrive], but who arrives [ce “qui” arrive],
the arrivant. The question “what to do with what or who arrives [(ce)
qui arrive]?” commands a thinking of hospitality, the gift, forgiveness,
the secret, testimony. The political stakes of these reflections have been
emphasized. All of that concerns “what or who arrives [(ce) qui arrive],”
the event as unpredictable. For an event that one foresees has already
arrived; it is no longer an event. What interests me in the event is its
singularity. It takes place once, each time one time. An event is thus
unique and unpredictable, that is to say without horizon. Death is con-
sequently the event par excellence: unpredictable even when foreseen, it
arrives and doesn’t arrive, it happens and doesn’t happen because when
it arrives or happens, unpredictable, it no longer arrives or happens to
anyone. Whence my interest in Blanchot’s texts on death as impossible.
Death, to put it simply, is the most continuous theme in everything I
have written, long before Clang [Galilée, 1974] and after The Gift of
Death [Galilée, 1999]. Everything begins with a thought of death and
everything returns to it. I can give three types of reflections that touch
on this thought of death as examples. The testamentary character of
writing (Of Grammatology): when I write, I know very well that what
I write can survive me, that what is at the origin of the trace can disap-
pear without the trace disappearing, this is its structure, a structure I
have called testamentary; spectrality too, which is indissociable from
the notion of trace—and the reflection upon which is present in my
work long before Specters of Marx: a trace is neither living nor dead;
finally, what I bring to the great question of the death penalty (I want
to emphasize here for political reasons)—I devoted a seminar of several
years to this, as well as few militant gestures, notably about the Mumia
Abu Jamal “case,” writing the preface to one of his books.4 The history
of the death penalty seemed to me to be decisive in itself and, at the same
time, a fascinating guiding thread for thinking the State, sovereignty and
power.
4 [Translator’s note] Derrida wrote the preface to the French edition of Mumia
Abu Jamal’s Live from Death Row (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley, 1995); trans. Jim
Cohen as En Direct du couloir de la mort (Paris: La Découverte, 1999).
Chapter 8
“If I can say more than one sentence”

(2004)
“Si je peux faire plus qu’une phrase . . .,” an interview with Sylvain
Bourmeau, Jade Lindgaard, and Jean Max Colard, conducted in 2004,
originally appeared in Les Inrockuptibles 435 (March 31–April 6,
2004): 24–34.
In your estimation, for what reasons is the government instituting

policy or policies that could be qualified as anti-intellectual?
If I had no qualms about signing the “Appeal against the war on intel-
ligence” straightaway, it is because it handled very carefully the so
very ambiguous word “intellectual.” By covering a field that includes
research, teaching, and the arts, but also other domains such as the
justice system or public health, you forestalled all objections. One was
no longer justified in thinking that the text was corporatist, or tended
to protect so-called intellectual “professions.” The word “intellectual”
must be handled carefully, but a word only gets its meaning from being
used in a sentence, or discourse, and yours noted clearly what intellec-
tual, and its opposite, anti-intellectualism, meant. I was also sensitive
to the fact that, well beyond any electoral considerations, you breached
the frontier of the right represented by Chirac and Raffarin1—which
has pushed to the point of caricature its aggressions against what is
called intellectuality—by signaling that the dangers of such a politics
already found their premises under governments of the so-called left,
or during periods of “cohabitation.” I think so too. I have for a long
time. Your text gave me confidence. It wasn’t limited to attacking the
Translated by David Wills. All notes to this chapter have been provided by the
translator.
1 Jean-Pierre Raffarin was prime minister from 2002 to 2005, under the presidency
of Jacques Chirac.
128 Interviews
current government, but embarked on an analysis and took cognizance

of what French politics has become since what seems like ages ago. And
you noted that such a politics was not only harmful to research, educa-
tion, and the arts, but also had effects felt throughout French society.
And that includes the economy: the Medef,2 which inspires the policies
of the current government, should understand that the development of
research is in its interest. Who is not, in his or her own way, an “intel-
lectual” today? Marx staked a lot on the opposition between manual
and intellectual workers, but such a distinction was already problem-
atic in the nineteenth century. Today it doesn’t amount to anything.
Henceforth any professional competence whatsoever is “intellectual,”
wherever technoscience, or computing (at least) has become indispensa-
ble, in policing as well as in medicine, in the army, transportation and
agriculture, in the media, in political life (where one even finds “great
intellectuals” as they are called, and “writers” [Mitterrand], even “great
writers,” sometimes coming out of the military [De Gaulle]).
You used the word “intellectuality.” We chose “intelligence” but

realize, given the violence of certain reactions, that it has become almost
unusable.
Intelligence has a long philosophical history. It is often opposed to

intuition (Bergson), or to reason (Kant, Hegel, etc.). In this context, and
in more everyday language, it would rather be the vigilance required
to stop knowledge being separated from action, knowing from doing,
theoretical knowledge from technical competence. The best examples
of that can be found in the medical or juridical fields. Medical profes-
sionals must be both attentive to research, which develops very quickly,
and simultaneously committed to the urgencies of therapeutic practice.
For the jurist, the same applies: to be intelligent is to know the history
of the law and of jurisprudence but also to know how to make a judicial
decision. In spite of my “intellectual” hesitations concerning the word
“intellectual,” I think you were right to choose it. It touched the very
nerve that needed to be touched, and made the right people nervous.
Such irritation around a so-called monopoly on intelligence, such a

denigration of the “intello”3 seems to be a very French phenomenon.
That might appear paradoxical in a country that remains in the eyes of
many—as a caricature—a country of “intellectuals.”
2 Mouvement des entreprises de France, France’s largest employer federation.

3 Familiar for “intellectual.”
“If I can say more than one sentence” (2004)
129
Yes, the word has a very French history. What we call here an intel-
lectual, a “great intellectual,” is most often a “great writer” or “great
philosopher” who, in the tradition of Voltaire, Zola, Sartre, or Foucault,
speaks publicly in order to denounce or accuse. In the name of justice
and sometimes against the law (which I always distinguish from justice).
One doesn’t find a comparable tradition, one that is as old or as well
established, elsewhere. In the United States or in England intellectuals
are not very visible in the public sphere, they remain in their universities
or domains of research or writing, intervening much less frequently in
the political arena. A figure like Noam Chomsky is in that context an
exception.
In France, intellectuals are present in newspapers, on the radio, and
more and more on television. That permeability between the intellec-
tual field and that of the media is a very French phenomenon. Speaking
out and assuming responsibility in political debate is a good thing for
the public sphere and for democracy, presuming at least that it doesn’t
become pure gesticulation, that it doesn’t let itself be contaminated by
self-promoting little narcissisms, facile demagogic gestures, or vulgar
editorial appetites. For, as always, it can also become ambiguous. For
about forty years politics has been conducted more and more on tel-
evision, which has become a much more powerful instrument than the
written press. But for twenty years the history of French television, with
more and more channels, competition for advertising, jealous cohabita-
tion between public and private channels, has required that discourses
and images be adjusted to what is (wrongly!) supposed to be the level of
the average French citizen, which therefore means a mediocre level. Any
discourse that seems complicated, sophisticated, requiring prudence,
having different layers, is in a sense excluded from television. That evo-
lution, which I have watched develop over the years, has not, moreover,
spared the written press: the number of times I’ve had it explained to
me that this or that was too complicated, that it would have to be cut
because people wouldn’t “follow.” Those in charge of the media that
structure the field of French public space are carrying out a veritable
campaign against intelligence, an offensive against everything that
shows intelligence and is necessarily complicated, layered, circumspect,
that proceeds according to its own rhythm, asks for time and deliber-
ateness. Bourdieu has said very accurate things about the telegraphic
“speed” that has been violently imposed by so many different media.
I have little experience of television, and for good reason, but I know
that each time they ask me to get straight to the point, to put everything
together in the form of a slogan or watchword. If I begin to take precau-
tions, to get into subtleties, I am cut off, interrupted, led to believe that
130 Interviews
the ratings will suffer. It would have been better to invite others, always
the same ones, who are only too ready to conform to such a law so that
they can benefit in small ways from it. This obligation to simplify, the
triumph of the simplistic, can be interpreted as a war—conscious or
not, deliberate or not—an implacable war nevertheless against intel-
ligence, intellectuals, or more broadly against intellectuality. Whether
it be a matter of literature, politics, or anything at all, getting across a
complicated discourse on television remains quite a feat. Given the mul-
tiplication of channels, I dreamed for a brief instant of programs where
one could take one’s time, give silences a chance, or hesitations (which I
think, in certain cases, are more fascinating and “media-friendly” than
the opposite, but so be it). The ratings are keeping watch, as therefore
is advertising, and competition works in the opposite direction. Public
channels are falling in line with private channels.
In your book of interviews with Elisabeth Roudinesco you noted that

“there is nothing serious in politics without this apparent “hairsplitting”
[sophistication] that sharpens the analyses without being intimidated
even by the impatience of the media.”4 Media formatting thus produces
disastrous effects, all the way to the discourse and practice of politics?
Yes, all the more so because a large number of intellectuals have interi-
orized these imperatives of presumed limpidity, vacuous transparency,
immediate intelligibility. They have set about producing the facile and
simplistic forms of discourse that were required of them. In the sixties
and seventies, “difficult” discourses were able to seduce, they got by,
they even “sold.” There was a receptivity, a demand for that way of
speaking. But, bit by bit, some— and often they were our students
. . .5—understood that all that no longer worked for the media. If one
wanted the fast track to becoming a media figure one had to simplify,
put it in black and white, cast off one’s heritage without being encum-
bered by concepts. The New Philosophers emerged at that moment. A
discourse of simplification, in ethical, juridical, and political terms, was
put in place, with influence over a broader public, as a perverse effect of
a just democratization of teaching. Politicians also adjusted to that type
of discourse. The a mbiguity—for here’s a complication I want to take
into account—was that often those young people mobilized for good
causes, just causes, human rights most notably. That generation fought
4 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 11.
5 This ellipsis, and subsequent ones, are in the text.
131
for causes that were often respectable, in the main, but by giving the
impression of exploiting them rather than serving them. The theatre of
the media was managed by that activity and it was difficult to oppose it
without seeming diabolical or rushing to the aid of “bad causes.”
I have many questions about human rights, about the history of the
concept, about what has been made of it, but never will I say that I am
“against.” I will never oppose someone who is fighting for human rights,
who appears on television in the name of human rights; I cannot and
will not. As a result I feel muzzled. It becomes very difficult to explain
that human rights have a history, that one has to know the conceptual
limits of such a notion, to what extent it was both enriched and com-
plicated after 1
789 . . . I t is very difficult to explain that today’s combat
for human rights cannot be limited to the classic causes that are habitu-
ally invoked, that it goes much further, that the majority of humanity
is dying of hunger, that AIDS is devouring Africa, etc., and that letting
die is sometimes just as serious, or even more serious than killing. For
example, none of the patented “human- rightist” spokespersons in
France have mobilized around those global tragedies and the political
culpability of all the citizens of rich countries, the “countries that respect
human rights.” Nor have they mobilized against the death penalty
(especially in China and the US). I’ve thought it necessary to do that for
years now, and not only in my teaching. I could recount the history of
my obligatory silences. There were moments when, even though I was
“on the left,” as they say, which I have always been, I could neither
subscribe to the official Marxist politics of the Communist Party, to
Marxism therefore, nor even to Althusserianism, but neither did I want,
in a given situation, rightly or wrongly, to express public opposition, to
make myself the “objective” ally of an anti-communism that was in my
eyes just as suspect. So I kept my mouth shut for a very long time. But
some knew how to interpret my silences by way of what I published.
Why?
I always voted left, of course, and marked quite clearly in my texts

what my preferences were, but I could never say that I was Marxist,
or communist, no more than I could s ay—perhaps I was w rong—that
I was frontally opposed to those forms of “the Left.” I didn’t want to
appear to be on the right. I wasn’t on the right. I therefore kept a silence
that I broke explicitly only much later on, that is following the fall of
communism, when I wrote Specters of Marx. At the end of the seven-
ties, at the beginning of the eighties, while at the same time judging
negatively a certain theatricalization by those intellectuals, those who
132 Interviews
are today called “media intellectuals,” I could not for all that condemn
them. Nevertheless, when I and others organized the Estates General of
Philosophy in 1979, I used my introduction to take to task intellectuals
who exploited the media and did a disservice to philosophy. Not only
did Bernard-Henri Lévy and [Dominique] Grisoni take me to task, and
try physically to obstruct the proceedings of the Estates General, but
even an Inspector General of philosophy who had been my professor,
Étienne Borne, accused me of going after people who were involved in
just and moral causes. It was not morality, even less justice, that I was
taking to task, but media practices and the abuses those people indulged
in for theatrical ends that, as I was just saying, were narcissistic and
self-promoting. One therefore felt somewhat paralyzed. And that is the
current that has allowed for the orientation that you are denouncing
today, as much on the left as on the right. For most of those men or
women I am talking about here have been politically on the left and on
the right, simultaneously or successively, blurring the divide and adapt-
ing each time to the dominant power, or to the two dominant powers in
the case of cohabitation. They cohabited with all the co-habitants.
Many artists who, like you, refused to appear on television in the 1970s
now regret that in the end they made room for others who continue to
occupy the entire space today.
That is true. For my part, as for other men and women who proved to be
extremely cautious, parsimonious, it was not out of contempt. I refused
to go on television on principle, but that wasn’t an opposition to televi-
sion per se. It was a mistrust of the way in which television functioned:
its rhythm, temporality, the culture of the interviewers. I would never
have accepted to appear on Pivot’s show6 (besides, he never asked me,
and for good reason). I had nothing against the man, who is commend-
able, and whose famous program performed a service, but I wouldn’t
have been able to speak with him, I foresaw the moment when he would
interrupt me to ask whether my text was autobiographical or not, have
me tell stories, narrate the plot of my book, etc. . . . But well before that
type of television there was another, with literary programs of a different
quality. Desgraupes and Dumayet7 spoke with intellectuals and writers,
taking their time, letting them speak, accepting silences and hesitations.
6 Apostrophes, weekly interview program with writers hosted by Bernard Pivot

from 1975 to 1990; replaced by Bouillon de culture from 1991 to 2001.
7 Pierre Desgraupes and Pierre Demayet were hosts of the first literary program on
French television, Lectures pour tous, which ran from 1953 to 1968.
133
I have nothing against that type of television and I continue to hope that
it will be recognized again and its qualities revived.
For a long time you refused to have your photograph taken, like [Daniel]
Buren until the moment when he realized that that was creating a sort
of myth around him.
I recognize that I gave in to that—what should I say?—that “ideology?,”

that prudish coquettishness. We were against representation. The writer
or philosopher wasn’t supposed appear on the cover of a book. That
wasn’t the point, it wasn’t necessary. That was Blanchot’s attitude, right
to the end of his life, and I shared such reserve. Besides, I have a difficult,
tormented relation to my own image, but that’s another story. Since the
two motivations reinforced each other, it was easy for me, for about
twenty years, to say “no, no pictures.” I began publishing in 1962 and
no photo existed until 1979. Resisting publishers and journalists wasn’t
easy. But I subsequently had to surrender to the force of circumstances.
Photographers are everywhere. The first moment my image became
public was during the Estates General of Philosophy, there were photog-
raphers in the room, it wasn’t possible to control things. I am unable to
justify myself completely except to say that I wasn’t against photogra-
phy but against a certain type of photo.
Beyond the question of photography, what space of resistance, or

perhaps of survival, remains possible in a mediatized world that renders
invisible those who don’t display themselves at work?
One must emerge from that invisibility when political causes require
it, provided one’s appearance isn’t for the purpose of promoting one’s
books or o neself . . . But one also has to try to control those appear-
ances, to take advantage of them in order to express one’s mistrust of
mediatization. Something I don’t fail to do on every such occasion. We
need to remind our journalist partners of their own responsibilities.
The first time in my life that I consented to be filmed for television was
when I returned from Prague. I had been imprisoned there, when, as
co-founder, with [Jean-Pierre] Vernant, of the Association Jean Hus
(dedicated to, and determined to help Czech intellectuals threatened by
the Communist regime), I had gone to Prague to hold clandestine semi-
nars with some of those persecuted intellectuals or researchers, and to
bring them books and money. At the end of my stay I was arrested at the
airport; they planted drugs in my suitcase, and imprisoned me. On being
released I was the only one who could bear witness to what had just
134 Interviews
happened. In Stuttgart journalists boarded the train bringing me back

from Prague. It was the night of January 1–2, 1982. Arrival at the Gare
de l’Est at dawn. A crowd of journalists. I had imposed on the television
journalists who boarded the train the condition that I be allowed to see,
in the studios, what they were going to edit for broadcast. So at 7 in
the morning I went with my wife and two sons, who had come to fetch
me, to the Rue François 1er. . . . François-Henri de Virieu met me and
showed me the images they were going to broadcast at noon. Resistance
consists in choosing one’s appearances, and in linking them to collective
political causes that are considered just, without playing the hero of a
(moving and marketable) personal adventure. I limited myself to paying
homage to the Czech intellectuals engaged in the struggle inspired by
Charter 77. One has to do all one can so as neither to abuse the media
nor to allow oneself to be abused by them. One has to state, in the
media, whenever possible, what one thinks concerning media responsi-
bility. To try to have the question of the media thematized, analyzed on
the media stage. As much as possible. One mustn’t resist the media in
general, but certain m edia . . . One has to distinguish one channel from
another, one program from another. Which presumes that one remains
actively interested in the media. I watch a lot of television. I read the
newspapers closely. Moreover, in my own way, in another sense, I am
also a media intellectual: in the public sphere I publish, I teach, I give a
lot of lectures, sometimes interviews . . .
That return from Prague, or the way that Foucault and Bourdieu
mobilized around what was happening in Poland at the beginning of
the eighties, marked the end of such classic appearances by intellectu-
als. As if the coming to power of the Left coincided with a long silence
and a retreat into academic work. We had to wait for the beginning of
the nineties to see other forms of intervention appear in public debate,
with Act Up, the social movement of 1995 or the alter-globalization
movement . . . Those are forms, perhaps a force that the political uni-
verse finds very difficult to grasp.
The wave you are talking about already exists, it is still finding its
way somewhat, but it is in the process of identifying itself. Allow me
to recall that I clearly insisted on that in Specters of Marx, in 1993, by
speaking of a new alliance or new International. I very much believe in
alter-globalization. Not in the forms that it is currently taking, which
are often confused and heterogeneous. But in the future, I think, deci-
sions will be made on that basis, hegemonic nation- states and the
organizations that depend on them (especially economic and monetary
“summits”) will have to take this power into account. Political parties
such as they exist at the moment, in France or elsewhere, are incapable of
135
taking on board a discourse of alter-globalization. If the force of resist-

ance that you speak of is able to constitute and identify itself, to act, it
cannot be recognized in any of the political apparatuses, discourses, in
politicians’ rhetoric on the right or left today. The big parties of the left
and right, which resemble each other more and more, cannot respond to
that demand. I have nothing against parties, parties are necessary. But
the idea that parties, of whichever stripe, are going to determine politics,
is over. The functioning of a party can no longer adjust to the problems
we are talking about. The new force we are alluding to is outside of any
party, it traverses the whole social field, it doesn’t belong to a social class
either, all sorts of workers come together in it. I would not be surprised
if among the signatories of your petition there are people who are not
“intellectuals” by profession (in the old classic sense). I imagine agricul-
tural workers, other workers understanding perfectly what it involves.
They know that scientific research must be supported, because we need
to know, because there is no techno-science without that, no public
health without it, no law or justice without it. Everybody knows that.
One doesn’t have to be an “intellectual” in the statutory sense to know
that. . . . France’s lower strata [La France “d’en bas”] (a grotesque,
odious expression)8 knows it and will make it known.
How do you imagine that a European public space can be built, an

element that is lacking in a Europe whose construction is already well
advanced?
There is no royal road. It requires multiplying the discourses so that

Europe is not simply a protectionist economic union. The Europe that I
would militate for would be a place for critical invention with respect to
democracy; it must think about recasting democracies against a certain
type of American hegemony, Muslim theocracies, and a certain China.
It therefore requires multiplying the discourses and the caveats. That
is, I think, one of the great responsibilities for intellectuals, those who
profess to reflect and think within public space; I would say philoso-
phers and jurists in the first place, economists also.
Another of Europe’s weaknesses derives no doubt from the fact that
it doesn’t possess an effective independent military force. Europe does
not have the force of arms capable of intervening on the ground for
causes that it considers just. The positions represented by Chirac and
8 Common term in the 2000s, especially on the right, to refer to the “little
people,” “those left behind,” lower middle and working classes; in the American
context, perhaps “flyover country.”
136 Interviews
Schröder when, as a result of complex motivations, they opposed Bush’s

“unilateralist” politics vis-à-vis Iraq—positions that I considered just,
whatever the complexity of their motivations—could do no more than
take the form of verbal opposition, on the stage of the Security Council
at the UN, whose rules were being violated. There seems to me to be an
urgent need for Europe to have a significant military force at the disposal
of a politics that is neither American, Chinese or Arabo-Islamic . . . For
the moment that is a bit utopian. But in European history and memory
(the good and the bad, the Enlightenment but also the worst moments
of modern totalitarianisms— fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the Shoah,
colonialism and the ordeals of a decolonization that hasn’t avoided
“crimes against humanity,” etc.)—in that “old” battered Europe there
is a resource that, granted, is paradoxical, a resource for the future (you
know that I don’t pass for a Eurocentrist, quite the contrary) that should
allow it, in order to change the international situation and its institu-
tions, international law, to resist the US and Islamic theocratisms, by
allying with those who, whether American, Arab, Iranian, or Chinese,
etc., struggle against the dominant politics of their countries. None
warrant more sympathy, for example, than all the Arabs and Muslims
who both suffer repression (for example, that against women) in their
countries and their cultures, and are at the same time unjustly associated,
in global public opinion, with terrorist crimes of the type perpetrated by
al-Qaeda. I think about them a lot, with friendship and compassion: for
example, the Palestinians who, while fighting for the legitimate inde-
pendence, to come, of their state, nevertheless condemn suicide attacks,
but also the Israelis who struggle against Sharon, and sometimes refuse
missions that they are assigned to, etc.
How do you respond to those who speak today, in the context of terror-
ism, of a fourth world war?
I am again going to have to complicate things. I well understand what

you are referring to. First, I would hesitate to call that a “world war.” It
isn’t a war. There is a history of the concept of war and it is over: there
will probably be no more “wars.” There is no war currently if “war”
means, in European vocabulary and law, hostilities declared by one
state against another. What is going on today, the “war on terrorism,”
isn’t a war. No state, as such, has approved or supported al-Qaeda-type
terrorism. It is therefore a matter of hostilities, of conflicts of force that
rage, that are more serious, perhaps more disturbing than this or that
international or civil war, but it is no longer a war. It is not just a ques-
tion of vocabulary: the word “war” leads us astray. Politically. In that
137
way Bush has led his people astray by calling for a “war on terrorism.”
But against whom in fact? Neither against Afghanistan nor even against
Iraq; this was not a war against the Iraqi nation-state. We need to find a
new word. Similarly for the word “terrorism,” which is also outmoded.
Why?
One cannot avoid using it, of course. It will be said that what happened
recently in Madrid was terrorism. But if I am asking for us to reflect on
this vocabulary it is not simply because of linguistic or semantic con-
cerns. I believe that the use of the word obscures what is going on politi-
cally, sometimes by design. There again, the words “terrorism” and
“terror” have a history. Terreur, for example, “terrour” in English, was
the word Hobbes used to define the main lever of every government. As
Benjamin put it, every government claims to hold a legitimate monopoly
on violence. It operates by means of fear. One doesn’t govern without
constraining by means of terror, or violence, or fear, etc. Already, in
that ordinary sense, every government is terrorist in its own way! And
moreover, jumping forward to modernity, modern wars have been to a
large extent “terrorist wars:” the [World War II] bombardments didn’t
spare French, English, German, Russian, or Japanese civilian popula-
tions. And the nuclear bomb, Hiroshima and its tens of thousands of
victims, was that not terrorism? Didn’t they attempt to shock the enemy
with murderous violence against civilian populations in numbers that
were incomparably greater than the number of the victims of the Twin
Towers or Madrid? Not only is there state terrorism, but the traditional
concept of terrorism is in essence associated with the concept of the state
as such. Now, there is a history of the word “terrorism” that goes back,
I believe, to the Terror of the French Revolution. In modern times it got
displaced, but always in situations where an organized group, neither
military nor civilian, was trying to liberate or reconstitute a nation-state.
Examples: Israel began with terrorism, the Zionists had recourse to ter-
rorism, following that, the Palestinians too, of course. It is also obvious
in the case of Algeria, on both sides. Members of the French Resistance
were terrorists! Under the Vichy government, the Nazi occupiers and
their French allies denounced and fought them as such; terrorism was
the everyday word. Then they became heroes of the liberation or of the
reconstitution of a legitimate nation-state, proud of itself and recog-
nized, like Israel or Algeria, by the global community. It is the equivalent
of what Carl Schmitt called the “war of partisans:” neither civil war nor
a war between nations, but the organized action of a group of resisters
that uses what are today called “terrorist” attacks in order to save a
138 Interviews
nation-state, to liberate or reconstitute it, or constitute a new one, as is

the case with Israel and Palestine. But today, what in most cases is called
terrorism—outside of I reland—concerns violent acts that are henceforth
no longer organized for political ends in the sense of wanting to trans-
form, constitute, or reconstitute a nation-state. There is no political
future as such in the actions of al-Qaeda. A movement represented by
al-Qaeda has no future, even if, unfortunately, its hateful and futureless
criminality can be disastrous, both for its presumed adversaries and for
those whose cause, faith, religion it claims to represent. So I wouldn’t
call that “war,” or “terrorism” either. It’s another situation, another
field, another history that is beginning. We need to invent other words,
become aware of other structures. It is the very concept of the political
that is changing. Since ancient Greece, “the political” has always been
associated with the polis, with the city, that is to say with the frontiers
of a nation-state that is localized within a territory. Today, and for
countless reasons, the political no longer has that form; it is no longer,
at least in the final analysis, the fact and the stable location of a nation-
state. Present or future conflicts risk being still more terrifying, precisely
because the enemy is indeterminate in that way. One no longer knows
who the enemy is. Schmitt said that the political is defined on the basis
of an enemy. Well, that’s over, there is no longer an identifiable enemy,
ethnically, religiously, or politically speaking. Anyone at all can become
an enemy. That’s terrifying, because technology in the service of anyone
at all can wreak havoc: either with conventional bombs, or with bacte-
riological, chemical, nuclear, and even cyber warfare. One is now able
to paralyze an entire country or armies by means of subtle interventions
within the cyber-apparatus. An apocalyptic-looking vision.
That vision, or apocalyptic reading, of the new international order is

one of the elements that are invoked to justify a politics of fear (for-
tress Europe, the criminalization of minor civil disturbances, attacks on
freedom of expression . . .) that has been set in motion by the American
and European authorities. What does this obsession with security
change with regard to the political? What new types of demand does it
impose on the political?
Who would deny it? Every democracy is threatened by the very necessity
of protecting itself against so-called “terrorism.” One can’t let every-
body do as they please within a territory. One has to find—something
very d
ifficult—a democratic politics that is capable of carefully managing
auto-immunity, the quasi-suicidal process that consists in an organism’s
destruction of its own defenses, the endangering of its self-protection.
139
In numerous recent texts I have extended the “figure” of this biological

notion across the whole field of experience, into the political field in par-
ticular. One could find countless examples of it today, and not only in
the suicidal aspects of American or Israeli policies. This auto-immunity
is not something that can be eradicated, it forms part of the structural
possibilities of the unconscious to begin with, but also of society, of
politics. One cannot, by definition, protect oneself from auto-immunity.
Political responsibility can then consist—by means of inventions that
are each time unique (there is no pre-established law for them)—only in
limiting the risks and the damage.
The ambiguity of the Bush government, like the Raffarin government,
is that they use fear to consolidate their power and policing, while saying
to people “don’t be afraid, we are here.” In order to fight against fear,
to prevent the idea of an inevitable fear from being instrumentalized by
governments, we have to realize that one cannot, unfortunately, fight
terrorism without the risk of limits on public freedoms, without threat-
ening democracy. That is the case at present in the United States, where,
since the passage of the Patriot Act, following September 11, infringe-
ments of civil rights have increased. The FBI is “legally” proceeding to
intervene anti-constitutionally, for example in e-mail correspondence.
Not to mention more secret and sinister intimidations. Or what is hap-
pening at Guantanamo Bay. The necessary struggle against “terrorism”
presupposes that states will collaborate. There have to be states, police,
and armies. I don’t believe it is good to militate for the disappearance
of the nation- state and sovereignty in general. Sovereignty must be
shared, its concept rethought, its space redistributed. Sovereignty is
still, perhaps, with certain conditions and within certain limits, a good
resource for fighting against both terrorism and global hegemonies,
economic ones especially, when they are not linked to nation-states. A
certain economic ultra-liberalism, for example, cannot but profit from
the weakness of the nation-state. The regulation of the market also sup-
poses that state authorities exist.
Unfortunately, one has the impression today that to seek to under-
stand terrorism is to risk being accused of excusing it, justifying it, even
absolving it . . . One is therefore caught between a series of calls to
order, like the law concerning the veil, which makes an appeal to laicity,
and the necessity of understanding the evolution of our society, the place
of Islam in France . . .
What tends to get lost is in fact the urgency of, or demand for,
understanding. Even where auto-immunitary complexity and its con-
tradictions are the most irreducible. But I don’t want to choose or even
distinguish between “understanding” and “justifying.” Not that they
140 Interviews
are the same thing. But “intellectuals,” and those who speak publicly,
must be allowed to say it in more than one sentence. It has to be possible
to say on the one hand “I condemn terrorism,” “I condemn al-Qaeda,”
“I have an immense compassion for their victims,” and at the same
time, on the other hand, in the very next sentence, say: “But I want to
understand how and why that has happened,” “I want to understand
the history of the geopolitical terrain and even its theological roots, in
order to reconstitute the very long genealogy of an event.” That act of
understanding is not simply an act of theoretical intelligence. It is not a
matter of understanding for understanding’s sake, in a speculative way,
but of understanding in order to change things, by referring to norms,
to justice (and not only positive law). For that, I have to be allowed the
possibility of saying more than one sentence, of not being trapped within
a dilemma. If I begin by saying that one has to analyze the genealogy of
the word “terrorism,” that one has perhaps to look for another term,
I have to be allowed to continue, to go a little further in order to say
that that doesn’t prevent me from condemning it, from being against
what is still called “terrorism.” I have to be allowed the time for both
of those sentences. And for a few others. In France people justified the
terrorism of the Resistance, and rightly so; one must be able to ask why,
and by what right, the Israelis think they have the right to justify the ter-
rorism that preceded the formation of their state, then sometimes their
state terrorism, and the Palestinians also, on their side, “terrorism” in
the service of a future Palestinian state. Such an analysis, which I can’t
develop here, may be interminable and in any case means going way
back in time, well before, and during World War II, in the direction of
responsibilities that are, in this example, neither strictly Palestinian nor
Israeli. The normative evaluation is thus indissociable from such an act
of comprehension. If I want simply to support a just cause, or justify
something, without attempting to understand it, then I am not justifying
anything at all.
There are, however, a lot of normative political and philosophical dis-

courses today, which speak of the world as it should be, and not as it
is . . .
Yes, but there have to be references to both. In all of my texts I try to

mark the fact that there are unconditional affirmations like justice, the
gift, hospitality that are neither practicable nor possible, that cannot give
rise to either a politics or law. One cannot make of unconditional hos-
pitality a political or juridical concept, it isn’t possible. As long as there
is law, politics, nation, territory, however hospitable one be, one will
141
have to limit hospitality. Nevertheless, one cannot think and advocate

a possible conditional hospitality without thinking unconditional hospi-
tality as a certain non-negative impossible. I have expressed myself on
that better elsewhere. One cannot improve on or revolutionize the law
without the idea of a larger justice, a more just law. If I want to be more
just I must embody justice today in better laws. If I want to be absolutely
welcoming toward the other, let the other come without asking for their
passport or name, and expose myself unconditionally to that coming of
the other, I must all the same have something to give concretely, and I
must therefore condition my hospitality. In each case I thus find myself
thinking the difficulty of two heterogeneous concepts, irreducible one to
the other but at the same time indissociable. You distinguish between
those who speak of the future without being involved in the present, and
others who do the opposite. For my part I would refuse to apply that
distinction. I do not lose sight of the fact that democracy is infinitely
perfectible, that it will moreover never, in essence, be perfect. But in the
name of that perfectibility I would like to be able to intervene to improve
things, even modestly, today, here, now.
If I had the misfortune to be asked to choose between the US and
al-Qaeda, I would choose the US, not because I approve in any way
at all Bush’s politics, but because I know that there exists in American
democracy a principle of perfectibility. There is that internal historicity.
That, for me, is democracy: within it public self-criticism is, by right,
possible; in it, perfectibility is infinitely open. The US certainly has its
share of guilt. The country has committed genocidal-type acts, through-
out a terrifying history that is still being judged (treatment of Native
Americans, slavery, nuclear bombs or weapons of mass destruction
that to this date the US is historically alone in having used, or in having
declared legitimate in order to protect its interests. One could cite many
other examples of unjustifiable violence since World War II). Moreover,
a new Russell Tribunal is in the process of being constituted in Brussels:
prior to a symbolic court case there will be a commission of inquiry
(which will, I hope, act according to probity, prudence, and honesty,
with witnesses for the defense and for the prosecution, a prosecutor and
lawyers on both sides). It will examine the PNAC (“Project for the New
American Century”), a document written in 2001 if I am not mistaken,
by Bush’s advisers, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, defining a strat-
egy for global domination.9
9 “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (2000), written by Thomas Donnelly, Donald

Kagan, and Gary Schmitt, was a report of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC) promoting “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend
142 Interviews
But at the same time, and I insist on this as strongly as is necessary, it

would be shamefully unjust, hateful, and ridiculous to deny that the US
abolished slavery, attempted to make reparations for violence committed
against Native Americans, established and helped advance civil rights,
that it has most often respected the First Amendment of its Constitution
(freedom of speech, freedom of the press and of public expression of
opinion, initial separation of church and state well before France, even
if the political in America remains profoundly marked by Christian
religiosity). That country and nation know they are perfectible and are
concerned to have a more democratic future, even if their economic and
military hegemony is more precarious than is generally thought (whence
the current state of tension). It is in the name of that democratic future
that I would be counted on their side, as opposed to al-Qaeda, which in
my eyes, let me say it again, has no future. Purely religious ideologies,
or those that claim to be religious, which have no political model, which
simply oppose believers and unbelievers and call for the extermination
of all “infidels,” are, I believe, ultimately doomed, even if for a time they
are capable of putting the world to fire and sword. In a binary situation
I would therefore vote for American democracy, but you see that what is
essential for me is not to let myself be backed into such a choice. Other
paths must be prepared.
Those who supported the American intervention in Iraq are also those
who have most criticized progressivism. It is a criticism that intersects
with critiques of “humanrightsism” [“droit de l’hommisme”], and of
anti-racism. . . . They accuse the defenders of public freedoms of being
too naive, too conciliatory, wide-eyed, or politically correct. What ideol-
ogy subtends that vision of things?
That denunciation of “political correctness” (I’ll purposely leave the

term in its original language) is abusive and multifarious. They import
a term that had a certain sense and efficacity in the US, where it was
inscribed in the struggle against sexism, phallocentrism, homophobia,
racism, etc., in conditions that are not the same as in France. In France,
the argument has been instrumentalized in order to condemn without
appeal every normative attitude, every opinion that claims to be just
and that they want to do away with as cheaply as possible. If you are
antiracist you are “politically correct.” If you are against homophobia
you will be soon be accused of being “politically correct” as a way of
its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military

forces.”
143
gagging you, muzzling you, imposing silence on you. I detest the way
that expression is used in France because they give themselves the right,
in good conscience, to denounce whatever is motivated by a desire for
justice. It amounts to a new orthodoxy. The expression can be used to
get rid of any enemy whatsoever. Which is pretty much what Luc Ferry
does in the case of the Inrockuptibles text, when he reproaches us in
the end for being “politically correct.” “To be an intellectual is to be
on the left and to sign petitions,” is more or less what he says. I think
that was more or less his only contribution to the dramatic debates with
academics, debates that he said he was following from a higher floor in
the Ministry.10
I am for the defense of human rights but against a “droit de
l’hommisme” that would be content, in making purely formal reference
to human rights, to mask all sorts of political and social problems on the
surface of the planet, forgetting human rights in many situations. Droit
de l’hommisme cannot stand in for policy, and notably social policy. We
come back to the necessity of our all being allowed to utter more than
one “main” sentence, such as: I am against droit de l’hommisme, but,
second sentence, not in the same way as Le Pen or a certain Marxist-anti-
legalist—and anti-formalist—extreme left! I am for the UN in principle,
for an international institution and an international law that legislates,
for example in the name of the human rights inscribed in its Charter,
but (second sentence) for a UN that would be profoundly transformed,
in its structure, its constitution, its legislative and executive powers, etc.
In French Philosophy of the Sixties, Renaut and Ferry accuse you of

sharing Foucault’s, Deleuze’s and Bourdieu’s . . . hatred for democracy,
whereas you have little in common philosophically, theoretically, and
politically, except perhaps that you support getting to the bottom of
things, the desire and wish to account for the complexity of things.
Yes, moreover that is what makes me nostalgic, even melancholic when

I think of those years past. In spite of our differences and disputes [dif-
férends], we had in common a passion—an ethico-political law—that
was tied to the imperative of knowing, understanding, analyzing, refin-
ing, not letting ourselves become complacent [se laisser endormir]. In
spite of our divergences we shared something that has pretty much
been lost since then. That was also true of literature. In certain minor
avant-gardes there was a requirement, I will even dare to say a “culture”
10 Ferry was Minister of Education in the Raffarin government from 2002 to

2004.
144 Interviews
regarding literature that has totally dissolved or been corrupted, to a

sometimes lamentable degree. As for the book you’ve just mentioned,
which is being talked about again for reasons that you know (it is now
quoted in the corridors of power: it is said that everything bad began in
1968!), I have always found it philosophically worthless, vulgar, con-
fused, the very paradigm of the most irresponsible misreadings.
What have been your own direct experiences of participating in power,

in “political life”?
I have never been a member of any party, except when I was a student.
At that time there was a miniscule radical party, smaller than the PSU,11
between the Parti Socialiste and the Parti Communiste. It was so small I
don’t even remember its name: the UGS perhaps, Union of the Socialist
Left?12 With one or two elected members in the Assemblée Nationale
it had to ally itself with the communist parliamentary group; that’s
the only time I carried a card. I have always been “on the left,” as one
says, I have always voted left but not always for the same faction of the
left, that depended on the election. Once Mitterrand came to power I
agreed to be present on some brief and very limited occasions relating
to domains that in my estimation fell within my competence, such as
teaching. Two or three times I was invited by Jack Lang13 to accompany
him in a delegation traveling overseas, to Tokyo, Mexico City, Madrid.
I was very much afraid of becoming a state intellectual and all that didn’t
last. In line with a struggle that I had undertaken, along with others, in
favor of the teaching of philosophy (creation of GREPH, the Groupe de
recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique, mindful of research but
also political intervention), promises were wrung from Mitterrand but
never kept. It was as part of the same impetus that I also co-organized
the Estates General of Philosophy in 1979, then participated in the
creation of the Collège international de philosophie, becoming its first
elected director. The Collège is, it’s true, a private institution by statute
(law of 1901),14 but it would never have come into being without the
support and encouragement of Jean-Pierre Chevènement.15 Finally, I
agreed, during Lionel Jospin’s term as Minister of National Education
11 Parti socialiste unifié, 1960–90, party of the social-democratic left, founded in

opposition to the support of the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière,
which would become the Parti socialiste) for the Algerian War.
12 Union de la gauche socialiste, founded in 1957, merged with the PSU in 1960.
13 Minister of Culture under Mitterrand, notably from 1981 to 1986.
14 Law passed on July 1, 1901, governing not-for-profit organizations.
15 Minister of Research and Technology from 1981 to 1983.
145
(1988–92), to co-preside, with Jacques Bouveresse, over a commission

on the teaching of philosophy, as part of a mission entrusted to Pierre
Bourdieu and François Gros. This last experience was very disappoint-
ing, it was all so futile . . .
Why?
It was all a show! The report that we submitted in 1991 on the organi-
zation of, and programs in, the teaching of philosophy, modes of
evaluation, etc., following broad consultations and a great deal of work,
immediately ended up in a drawer in the Ministry and was never heard
of again. Such instrumentalization is quite evidently a canny form of
anti-intellectualism, a way to give oneself intellectual alibis. It consists in
saying “intellectuals are with us,” they work for us, they submit reports
to us, they even appear on lists of supporters (which I have never done).
Obviously I was more inclined to work with the left than the right but I
was exploited because no one took what was done into account. And I
am certainly not the only example. Anti-intellectualism consists, in that
context, of pretending to appeal to well-known “intellectuals” in order to
give oneself an alibi. After that, one does whatever political and electoral
wheeling and dealing, or economic constraints require; and they have
the gall to say that politics is powerless in the face of economics without
realizing the enormity of it all, without taking any account of what has
been said, even by some economists, and without even reading anything
at all. If one wants to be interested in “intellectuals,” one doesn’t simply
ask them for useless reports, one reads them, takes them into account.
It should even mean sometimes— but I’m d reaming— attending their
seminars! One has to listen to what is going on there. A prime minister
of today should know, at least in outline, the problems of the physical,
medical, or biogenetic sciences, etc. Or if Raffarin himself doesn’t know
that, his Minister of Research should (or so should a President of the
Republic accountable to a majority that elected him, who then quickly
forgot that the majority wasn’t his),16 he should be aware and oppose,
in a responsible way, catastrophic reductions in positions and in budget
allocations; he should do everything to curb what is beginning to look
like a wave of emigration on the part of intellectuals and researchers.
In France there is a real migration problem: on the one hand, immi-
gration is severely limited or conducted without social “integration”
16 Jacques Chirac was re-elected president in 2002 by a landslide (82 percent),

thanks to the support of voters on the left who opposed his run-off opponent, far
right (National Front) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
146 Interviews
of any consequence (look at the problem of the “veil”), and the whole
problematic of “security” is irresponsibly associated with it, governing
all political and electoral life; on the other hand, there is the great risk
of a growing emigration on the part of researchers and academics; not
to mention economic outsourcing and certain disastrous social effects
that result. Problems of the politics of the border, therefore, problems of
sovereignty (of its concept and of its crises), the problem of Europe to
come. All that needs to be rethought. But I explain myself better in other
places and this is already too much for an off-the-cuff interview.
Chapter 9
Conversation about the Collège

International de Philosophie (1998)
“Conversation autour du Collège international de philosophie,” with

Jacques Derrida, Miguel Abensour, Élisabeth de Fontenay, Marie-
Louise Mallet, and Etienne Tassin, conducted by Daniel Dobbels in July
1998, was published in Lignes 35 (October 1998): 121–36.
Étienne Tassin: The originality of the Collège, as I see it, was that it was
an institution based on three pillars. First pillar: it was the only institu-
tion that gave teachers in the secondary educational system a status as
researchers. Second pillar: it was the only institution that was concerned
with connecting instructors and researchers in the provinces with what
was happening in Paris (there was a status as “director of programs
in the provinces”). Third pillar: its international openness. And this
attempt to do the splits between the least professor working in the prov-
inces and the most eminent researcher from some foreign university was
very remarkable and represented a kind of remarkably interesting chal-
lenge that would suffice to characterize the Collège.
These three pillars correspond precisely to three deficiencies in the
French university system. First deficiency: the university system is indif-
ferent to what happens in secondary education—there was, there still is,
a terrible gap between teaching high school, on the one hand, and being
a teaching researcher at a university, on the other. Second deficiency,
which too is maintained in the French University: the gap between the
provinces and Paris, as if Paris were the only place of salvation—the
Collège tried to remedy this and establish a bridge between the prov-
inces and Paris. Third deficiency: the French University has a relatively
closed-off attitude concerning what is happening abroad, not only when
it comes to analytic philosophy, as is sometimes said, for example, but
more generally with respect to universities and researchers abroad. We
Translated by David Maruzzella.

148 Interviews
readily believe that those who were not trained according to the same
criteria and with the same kind of education as us can’t claim to have
the same intellectual authority. So many deficiencies, so many gaps;
and so many connections, so many bridges that the Collège has created.
It is not my intention to put the university on trial, and to oppose
the Collège to it, but the fact is that ten or fifteen years a go—though
perhaps less so now—a practice of philosophy that consisted in con-
sidering that the only research worthy of the name was research in
the history of philosophy, and not at all the inventiveness of concepts,
prevailed in a flagrant way in the university. It was a matter of doing
the history of what had been said rather than taking the risk of taking
up certain contemporary problems, at the margins, at the borders of
philosophy.
More specifically concerning this third p oint— international
relations—we must highlight that the Collège did not go through the
mediation of University authorities or international philosophical socie-
ties, but was able to make contact, in foreign countries, with individuals
who were in the same situation as those in France who were of interest
to the Collège, that is to say, those who were not necessarily recognized
by the university or who were in ambiguous situations, who didn’t have
a seat at the table, who didn’t have notoriety. The Collège, from this
point of view, did admirable work that no other institution would have
been able to do in its place over the last ten years, work that consisted
in going out to find little-known or even unknown people, living in dif-
ficult situations, and giving them access to research centers. Speaking
for myself, I was particularly interested in relations with Latin America;
it is rather extraordinary to see all these connections that were forged
and which, contrary to what people may say, were extremely produc-
tive. Of course, this wasn’t officially registered by the academy or the
institution, at the level of university recognition; this is why what we
were doing sometimes remained discreet or obscure. The Collège for me
represented this: the possibility of doing philosophy outside of the game
of recognition—this being the condition for interesting and innovative
philosophy.
Miguel Abensour: For me the primary interest of the Collège was the
ability to do research in political philosophy. Because you have to keep
in mind that at the time—and I do mean at that time, for the current
situation is totally d
ifferent—political philosophy was not taught in
philosophy departments, or if it was, let me be clear, it was the privi-
lege of a few reactionaries who believed there was a tradition to main-
tain and who, for the most part, and this might still be the case now,
Conversation about the Collège International de Philosophie (1998)
149
conflated political philosophy with legal philosophy. And in political

science curricula, political philosophy was purely and simply consid-
ered a remnant of ideology. The Collège thus first of all appeared to
me as a place where one could try to teach political philosophy, less in
the sense of inscribing oneself in a tradition, but rather believing that
it was important to teach this discipline, if it is a discipline, under the
sign of questioning. Another element attracted me to the Collège: I was
already the director of a book series and, in this capacity, I had edited
many works by the Frankfurt School. Now, the mode of functioning
of the Frankfurt School always appeared to me to be exemplary. In a
certain sense, I welcomed the Collège as an attempt in the contempo-
rary world to repeat this experiment, to repeat the experiment that the
Frankfurt School undertook, which in its own way had been taken up
by the College of Sociology in France at the end of 1930s. When I was
given some responsibilities at the Collège, I kept this model in mind, all
the more so because it seemed to me that there were possible bridges
between the critique of modernity undertaken by the Frankfurt School
and the one, inspired by Heidegger, that was represented by certain
members of the Collège. It was a space for a possible confrontation
between these two critiques of modernity. Lastly, I believe credit must
be given to the Collège as it was a place where what we had fought
for in 1 968—that is to say a single community in education, namely
an anti- hierarchical institution—was realized since at the Collège
post-secondary instructors and researchers from the CNRS coexisted,
without any hierarchy, with teachers from primary and secondary edu-
cation. This is to my mind the utopic dimension that the Collège always
had, a utopia that should make of it the site of a permanent resistance
to the normalization that threatens it as it threatens any institution,
whatever its specificity or exceptionality.
The final point on which I’d like to insist: one of the great merits of the
Collège, it seems to me, is to allow those who are able to devote them-
selves to research to show a certain audacity. Audacity to break with the
known and to work in other domains, to give themselves over to a more
or less experimental practice of philosophy. This was equally part of the
logic of the Collège.
Élisabeth de Fontenay: I was immediately taken by the impression the

Collège gave off of being something of ’68 that was continuing and fol-
lowing in the footsteps of the GREPH, which was itself a direct result of
’68. The Collège, given how influential Derrida had been in its founda-
tion, seemed to me to be completely in the continuity of the GREPH.
I was equally struck by and very much taken by the sudden encounter
150 Interviews
made possible between philosophers who did not keep, or no longer

kept, company with each other (because in 1968 we had seen a lot of
one another) and above all the encounter with other disciplines that
was suddenly made possible—I don’t even know if this word is really
the right one because it was a matter of meeting painters, musicians,
people who worked in the theatre. All of this seemed to me to carry an
extraordinary richness, carry a great hope for freedom in speaking and
writing for people who were isolated both in their teaching and in their
research. Isolated like those teaching at the secondary level, obviously,
shut away in the provinces in a rather sinister way, but also like those at
the CNRS or the university.
I can’t think of the first impression that the Collège made on me
without thinking of this absolutely remarkable band of four: Châtelet,
Derrida, Lecourt, and Faye. Every critique of the sectarian character
of the Collège is totally ridiculous when you think of the radical diver-
sity of these four individuals who had already more or less formed an
alliance during the Estates General of Philosophy. For between ’68,
GREPH, and the Collège, there were those famous Estates General
of Philosophy, which were unforgettable for those who participated.
There was a profound joy in seeing thinkers so original, who were in a
sense institutionalizing, instituting advances in their thought. I’m saying
this all the more forcefully as the majority of critiques that have been
brought against the Collège fall under psycho-sociological problems,
problems of generational resentment that strictly are of no interest.
Those like Renaut, Ferry, Comte-Sponville, and others wanted to liqui-
date those who had been their professors and teachers, in order to return
to God knows what, to Kantianism or whatever.
Marie-Louise Mallet: I wish to add only two clarifications regarding the

specificity of the Collège: at its core, and this was always announced
as one of its fundamental principles, the Collège had to also be open
to non-University people. In other words, the quality of a prospective
program must be the only criterion and not the credentials of the one
proposing it. So absence of credentials mustn’t stop a research project,
if it is interesting, from being accepted. On the other hand, the Collège
always claimed that its activities need not only take the form of a lecture
or a seminar, but could also include “performances.” More or less put
into practice (and principally in the artistic domain: plastic arts, music
. . .), this vocation of the Collège is nevertheless one of its founding ideas.
Étienne Tassin: One could describe the Collège on the basis of a double
principle: on the one hand, that of philosophy outside of itself [hors de
151
soi], that is to say not philosophy as it is practiced inside of the institu-

tion as an academic discipline, but philosophy that invents itself, includ-
ing from out of sites that aren’t in themselves philosophical at all; and
this first principle of a philosophy outside of itself is accompanied by
another: philosophy in common. By this I mean that philosophy is not
necessarily a solipsistic activity, that it calls for collegiality, even if its
attempts aren’t always successful, that its practices can have something
to gain from being carried out with others. This is an important point
which has no equivalent elsewhere.
Miguel Abensour: We would have to reflect upon, in this same direc-

tion and in a more sustained way, the specificity and exceptionality
of the Collège. Because it is on the basis of this reflection that we will
be able to fight against a number of recurring phantasms, which I will
call phantasms of normalization. I mean by phantasms of normaliza-
tion, something that appears frequently in the discourse of certain
members of the Collège, the idea according to which the Collège would
have been a chrysalis and that now the time would have come for it
to become a beautiful butterfly. Put differently, this idea according to
which it would have known a seductive moment of infancy, placed
under the sign of fantasy and that now we would have to enter into the
serious age of adulthood. This seems to me an alternative worthy of a
bureaucrat ignorant of all the forms of relation between adulthood and
moments of beginning. This is what is transpiring with the concept of
re-founding, a concept which is, moreover, completely foreign to the
Collège given that the latter is itself a critique of the idea of founda-
tion. By re-founding we must understand that this would be turning the
Collège into an École des hautes études en philosophie or a philosophi-
cal Collège de France. It seems to me that one of the ways to conserve
the Collège’s exceptionality would be to create a kind of permanent
and open seminar that would have as its object a collegial reflection
on the meaning of this exceptionality: in such a way that we wouldn’t
ever lose sight of this exceptionality and in such a way so as to lead
to a reflection on institutions which, at the heart of modernity, have
undertaken a more or less analogous experiment to that of the Collège.
I’m thinking, as I said a moment ago, of the Frankfurt School or the
College of Sociology. In both cases, we come across this articulation
that must be sought out between diverse forms of thoughts and lines
of questioning. For example, in the case of the College of Sociology,
it is this articulation between French sociology, a sense of the sacred,
Marxism and Psychoanalysis and the relation to society that allowed
Bataille to produce one of the first analyses of fascism, a completely
152 Interviews
remarkable analysis (we see the same thing in the Frankfurt School).
I think that what is important is that the relation between philosophy
and the present moment, of philosophy to society and let’s say, the
relation between philosophy and social and political critique, never
be neglected. With this specificity, it seems to me, we can establish
an extremely clear distinction between ideology and philosophy. The
Collège can be this space of a permanent critique of ideology, a critique
that would allow us to show how there is always an autonomy for phi-
losophy to lay claim to with respect to ideology. Lastly, this reflection
on the exceptionality of the Collège would have to take up the question
of its temporality. It indeed has a specific temporality, which is not that
of an institution. And we might say, in a phenomenological way, that
what seems to be the defect of the Collège, its fragility, or its precarity,
is itself the very essence of the Collège and it is this essence to which it
must be faithful.
The central question for an institution like the Collège is: what would
it mean to elaborate a critical thinking that takes place in the margins
of or at a distance from State-run institutions and from the relation
between State and philosophy?
Étienne Tassin: Which leads us to raise the question of the future of the
Collège, including from the point of view of its financial existence. It is
true that between 1983 and today a considerable change has occurred
internal to the French democratic State and that the dominant idea at
the moment, as opposed to the one that was dominant in 1983, is that
financial resources must be sought out among private business and spon-
sors rather than the State alone. This means that we can easily see a new
figure of the Collège forming—this has already s tarted—that would be
a service provider for private businesses in need of training courses, a
curriculum of critical reflection on their own functioning or their own
modes of economic organization. This would turn the Collège into a
service among others on the economic market. This transformation
couldn’t be carried without deeply affecting the nature and spirit of the
work carried out at the Collège.
Marie-Louise Mallet: One specific thing about the Collège is indeed that
it positions itself in this very problematic and very unstable in-between
space, being at once an institution independent of the State and one
which nevertheless still asks to be supported by it. One of the political
ideas of the Collège is to demand that the democratic State support an
institution independent of it.
153
Miguel Abensour: It is also important to insist upon the freedom of

the Collège, owing to its very singularity. It turns out that the Collège
has organized colloquia that no academic institution would ever have
attempted because of the conflicts that would have inevitably arisen.
This was the case for the Heidegger conference in which we brought
together participants who were considered as having conflictual rela-
tions with one another. Yet this colloquium went really well. It is a good
indication of the kind of space of thought that the Collège offers. On the
one hand, it is not a consensual space; on the other hand, it is not a place
where we work to cultivate and rigidify oppositions in order to make it
into a kind of fixed antagonistic field.
Jacques Derrida: I would like to jump in by also recalling all of the hopes
that I and the others had for the Collège at its inception in 1983. Among
all these hopes, which have not been disappointed, there was, on the one
hand, that of a diversity of participations, a diversity that is itself diverse,
that is to say, a diversity of positions, teachers, non-teachers, French,
non-French, professional philosophers, people coming from other disci-
plines, and [on the other hand] a diversity that took a stand, which was
that of resistance to intimidation. It is possible, of course, that there be
diversity, non-consensus, in universities, but the institution-effects make
it so that these discussions, in particular when it comes to organizing col-
loquia, are limited; in any case this dissensus is not sought after for itself
unlike us, who deliberately took that risk from the outset. The example
of the Heidegger c olloquium—we could take many other examples if
we had time—was particularly remarkable in this sense because it was
right in the middle of the “Heidegger affair” and I remember presenta-
tions where it was, on the one hand, about showing one’s competence
in reading Heidegger’s texts, and, on the other hand, showing different
ways of being in disagreement with Heidegger, of posing, in particular,
political questions to Heidegger’s texts and thought without giving into
the media trials and summary methods that were dominating the public
scene. From that point of view the spirit of resistance to intimidation, no
matter where it comes from, whether from institutions already in place,
or from the theatre that is the media, or even from Parisian doxa, this
resistance is what always attracted me to the Collège and I believe that
it is still alive. We also took care to make sure that this resistance wasn’t
one of resentment, or of war; we took all the necessary precautions, the
most explicit possible, in order to make it clear that we weren’t at war
with the university, that the differences that separated us from other
academic institutions weren’t experienced by us in the modality of war.
And this provocation of resistance, provocation that I believe was calm,
154 Interviews
which has always remained rather serene and that should remain so
owing to the very diversity of the Collège’s collaborators (we have never
formed a homogeneous battalion), this provocation to resistance drew
its force from the fact that the space of the Collège, the space of thought,
the space of institutional installation, symbolically, was not Paris. Of
course, the Collège is indeed in Paris, but we’ve always felt, and we’ve
done everything we can to confirm it, that our essential space was not a
space of Parisian citizenship or even French citizenship. This gave us a
lot of freedom, at least symbolically, not to fall into the traps that people
have never ceased laying for us. Whatever these traps may have been,
that’s not where we were, and this is what allowed for, it is what I hope
will allow for a survival of the Collège that is not merely a survival but
a life that is constantly being renewed.
Daniel Dobbels: Would you mind clarifying the meaning of this mode
of “not being there” all the while being there; and are you not of the
opinion that it is this mode that caused so much hatred and so many
attacks? Can we imagine that thought not be necessarily, indissociably,
linked to war? We indeed see that there is a specific hatred with respect
to this resistance. What was going on for them in this moment?
Jacques Derrida: The tit-for-tat response would be that hatred is devel-

oped precisely where war is thwarted. These are those, whether they
know it or not, whether they declare it or not, who are in virtually
warlike positions, either hegemonic positions or positions of power, and
who are disappointed and enraged by the fact that somebody doesn’t
show up to this appointment for war. And the Collège, in a certain sense,
multiplied these stand-ups. Not just because we had a taste for standing
people up: we attended all the meetings that we deemed correct and nec-
essary; but we stood up these appointments for war, and this was due to
the fact that, I think, we didn’t want to play tricks with being-there and
alibis. From the beginning, we wanted to own the fact that the Collège
was set up in Paris, that, even with minimal means, it took advantage of
French circumstances and that the French language was dominant—this
was very clearly stated. But, simultaneously, we made it clear that we
did not wish to be prisoners of this fact and that we wanted, as quickly
and efficiently as possible, to admit the right to other languages, other
thinkers, philosophers, artists, specialists from other countries and give
them the right to take part in the decisions made by the Collège, to look
for means that were other than public and French. This was a difficult
strategy which we pursued with our cards on the table; and I think I am
able to say without being smug that we remained on course. There is still
155
a lot to be done. We must constantly return to it, the Collège is young.

It is a process that is still happening and even still to come. The Collège
has accomplished a lot in fifteen years, but what counts is what it is in
the process of doing and what it will do. And from this point of view
there is no possible equivocation: we were where we thought we had to
be and we also took steps to be elsewhere when we deemed that this was
what had to be done.
Miguel Abensour: What Jacques Derrida calls the resistance to intimida-

tion is the resistance to what we could call the hygienics or the police of
the humanities [lettres], which exists in the Parisian scene. To take just
a few examples of certain kinds of discourses that we’ve seen prolifer-
ating these last few years, there are the discourses of restoration that
followed an extremely simple paradigm, which consist in saying that
there is supposedly a diabolical t riangle—Marx, Nietzsche, F reud—that
has perverted thought; once these thinkers have been conquered (as if
the problem could be posed in these terms), it would then be possible
to dedicate oneself to restoring and taking up these traditions again.
Whether it be a matter of political philosophy, whether it be a matter of
moral philosophy, this work of restoration ignores in a sovereign way
everything that happened in the meantime. From this point of view as
well, it seems to me, the Collège sets itself apart; it sets itself apart on
the one hand by its resistance to falling into this Manichean vision of
thought, and on the other hand in its questioning attitude when faced
with the tradition and in its awareness that the tradition is b roken—we
are in a field of ruins—and that we cannot rejoin the tradition as if
nothing happened.
Jacques Derrida: The Collège, obviously, tried to avoid every tempta-

tion of a reactive restoration, every denunciation of modernity. But it
also did this in a very particular style, that is to say by recommending
that we continue to read the great texts of the tradition, the major
canonical texts. This was said and done from the start: there were both
seminars on very quirky things and seminars on Plato, on Kant, which
made it so that the question could also be posed about the institu-
tional and philosophical procedures by which it is decided that a text
is canonical in opposition to a marginal text, that a text is a major as
opposed to minor text; without, let me add, systematically privileging
minor texts or so-called minor texts. We put questions to the logic of
this canonization.
So no restoration, but a respect, affirmed from the start and reaf-
firmed constantly since then, for the philosophical tradition, for
156 Interviews
hilosophical philosophy in the most traditional sense; the Collège

p
crossed this traditional philosophical vein with veins that were not
in the first instance philosophical in the academic sense of the term.
Whence the opening on the side of the sciences and on the side of
the arts and not only art theory, the discourse on art, but also that of
artistic practice. In conformity with the initial project, we did all that
we could so that the Collège didn’t remain content with philosophical
discourse on painting, music, dance, etc., but so that it would encour-
age “performative” productions, actualizations. This perhaps didn’t
happen enough, but it did happen: for music, of course, but equally
for painting, under the heading of “Painters’ Studios,” with encounters
taking place as close as possible to the work of these painters. Each
time that we were able, we crossed, in the topological and genetic sense
of the term, properly philosophical concerns with concerns that pertain
to science or art and from art in its poietic dimension, that is to say
productive, “performative.”
Daniel Dobbels: What seems to me to appear throughout the attacks

that the Collège is undergoing is that this institution that is not one,
which is perhaps at the heart of the very porousness of any institution,
broke with the logic of “frontal opposition;” and what I hear in what
you are saying is that, on the one hand, it is not a question of impressing
the other; it is not, on the other hand, a question of the other making an
impression in order to be able to get closer to the work happening at the
Collège. This is perhaps what constitutes the kernel of the most power-
ful resistance: this logic of rupture with “frontal opposition.” For, even
if one is ignorant of what exactly the Collège is doing, it at the same time
works for those who are also in the logic of rupture, that also have the
“front to” . . .
Jacques Derrida: In a word, the logic of the Collège has never been a
logic of antagonism. A logic of difference, but never of antagonism. It
being a question of differences, since, let’s not forget, it is an interna-
tional college of philosophy, very quickly, all that we are saying has
gathered around the national question, of France, of Europe and of
the world. In a certain sense, the Collège didn’t want to get enclosed
in Parisian France or in France in general, but nor did it want to be
opposed to eurocentrism (the question of Europe has often been posed
within the Collège, and moreover we have multiplied the contacts and
agreements with other European institutions); nonetheless it is not
solely European. It refused to let itself be enclosed in the alternative
Eurocentrism/anti-Eurocentrism.
157
It is equally important to recall that the Collège regularly had program

directors who were foreign, and who were abroad. The philosophical
problem of translation and the work of translation are an essential part
of the Collège’s activity, both as a theoretical concern and as something
to be put into practice . . .
Chapter 10
Hospitality ad infinitum (1999)
“Une hospitalité à l’infini” (97–106), “Responsabilité et Hospitalité”

(111–24), “Une hospitalité sans condition” (133–42), and “Accueil,
éthique, droit et politique” (143–54) (with Michel Wieviorka) originally
appeared in Manifeste pour l’hospitalité, aux Minguettes: autour de
Jacques Derrida, edited by Michel Wieviorka and Mohammed Seffahi
(Grigny: Paroles d’aube, 1999).
I am an arrivant already quite worried that I cannot live up to the hos-

pitality offered to me: I thank you for your hospitality, and that is not
merely a manner of speaking.
I have not prepared for this session for several reasons. One of
them is that if, in a certain sense, hospitality is something that is
always unknown to me, I have nonetheless worked for several years
to articulate a philosophical reflection, a reading of canonical texts on
hospitality, with the urgent problems of our society. Moreover, I felt
justified by the fact of not knowing what to be prepared for: I found
myself in an almost debilitated state by what was awaiting me here, as
I am not really familiar with the reality of the social work that you do
here.
I have thus arrived here in the situation of the backward child who
will try to learn a bit about the very grammar of your problems, without
wildly giving in to verbal or fantasmatic notions. It seems that I am
among interns, social workers (a term I will return to), teachers . . . In
short, I don’t really know who is facing me, and that is indeed the situ-
ation of hospitality.
In hospitality without conditions the host [hôte] who receives should,
in principle, receive before knowing anything at all about the guest
Translated by Jacob Levi. All notes to this chapter have been provided by the
translator.
159
[hôte] that he or she is welcoming. Pure welcoming consists not only

in not knowing, or acting as if one did not know, but in avoiding all
questions on the subject of the identity of the other, their desires, rules,
language, or abilities to work, assimilate, adapt . . . Once I pose all these
questions and impose these conditions (and the text read by Mohammed
Seffahi reminded us that these are quite the opposite of hospitality, in
the name of the actual conditions of hospitality), the ideal situation of
non-knowing is broken.
It must be possible to speak immediately on the basis of this non-
knowing. Poetic speech emerges here: one must invent a language.
Hospitality must be so inventive, adapted to the other and the welcome
of the other, that each experience of hospitality must invent a new
language.
Social, political, and other problems are caught between this idea of
pure hospitality, this poetics of unconditional hospitality, this event
without prior grammar, and the problems of conditions, ethnicities,
borders . . .
We agree that we are to speak here about hospitality. But the use of
this word immediately poses the question of knowing whether it can
be translated by other words such as immigration, or the integration of
foreigners. Are these homogeneous concepts? Do they concern the same
thing?
A minister of the interior or a politician who adopts a generous leftist
position on these questions might very well explain to us that immigra-
tion and hospitality cannot be considered homogeneous or identical
phenomena. That hospitality refers to the great canonical texts, and
immigration to the adaptation of (potential) citizens to a given state
of French society. Hospitality, in an ethical register, would supposedly
consist in welcoming the other into the private space, offering asylum in
the sense of the Greek traditions. Whereas foreign citizens and undocu-
mented immigrants who arrive here en masse, who must be integrated
into our society, supposedly fall under the heading of an entirely differ-
ent economic or social problem.
Even if it is not mine, I nonetheless recognize a certain right to this
discourse which doesn’t consider the translation of an ethics of hospi-
tality into political and economic rules as self-evident. Power’s putting
things to the test can thereby transform an ethics of hospitality into a
pragmatism. It is indeed difficult to translate the purity of an ethics of
hospitality into the body of laws.
But the problem is not limited to this one question of the moral
purity of hospitality (which would be unanimously accepted) that
would then be embodied, laboriously, in conditions of mediation that
160 Interviews
are much less angelic. Pure hospitality, the welcoming of the other
without condition and without question, entails an intrinsic threat of
perversion.
Indeed, the person I welcome in could be a rapist, an assassin,
he could bring disorder into the home: such eventualities cannot be
excluded. Now, in pure hospitality, without guarantee, we must accept
the possibility that the other comes to start a revolution, or even a worse
form of the unpredictable, and that we might be overrun. From the very
fact that this threat essentially and irreducibly inhabits the pure principle
of hospitality, it induces behaviors of anxiety and hatred.
In her examination of what occurred in Europe before World War II
with the decline of the League of Nations, Hannah Arendt demonstrates
that there were already massive displacements taking place, not of exiled
people, but of populations without status and without state guarantee
who represented a kind of call for pure hospitality. This is how she
explains the genesis of hatred and these violent outbursts to which one
was not accustomed in classical forms of exile.
Situations of pure hospitality thus contain an internal tragedy. The
passage to law, politics, and the third party constitutes, in a certain sense,
a kind of fall, but at the same time, it is what guarantees hospitality’s
effectiveness. Here, a political aporia appears that demands a responsibil-
ity be taken, not between a pure hospitality and a conditional hospitality,
but within conditional hospitality so that it might be the best possible.
Responsibility thus involves offering the best conditionality, the best pos-
sible law for a hospitality that one wants to be as great as possible.
With these generalities posited, I would like to respond to the earlier
remarks to pose some more questions. I often ask myself if hospitality
is on the side of silence or speech. As soon as I speak, I ask my guest to
understand my language and the sublanguages it contains, its forms of
politeness, its language of law . . . There is violence as soon as I speak to
the other. The question is also whether hospitality requires speech or, on
the contrary, a certain silence.
In the event that speech is allowed, should we understand this to mean
simple words like “hello, hello,” “I love you, I love you,” “enter,” or do
we need to go further and have a discussion? This latter option asks the
new arrivant, if he or she wishes to stay, to know how to discuss and
how to respect the democratic rules of discussion.
I heard the end of an intervention that, in the form of a “one must”
[il faut] (one always thinks in terms of “one must,” even in a disguised
way), said: “no alienation” and “no assignation.” It is true that, from
the point of view of the hospitality that we are speaking about, all assig-
nation, all authoritarian injunctions must be avoided. But in the exercise
161
of a (social, teaching, or other) work, can we suspend all assignation?

And furthermore, is that desirable?
When I receive someone, to behave as a host worthy of the name,
I do not give orders, I allow them to enter, I avoid all inductions, all
injunctions . . . But allowing the other to enter my home (or whatever
place where I am in the position to receive as host) already orients this
person in advance according to a map of implicit assignations: language,
rules of conviviality, and many others. I must assuredly avoid brutal
forms of assignation, that much I understand, but to remove all assigna-
tion, to leave the other (toward whom I go, or whom I allow to come)
without any assignation can give birth to anxiety and unpredictable
reactions both for me and the other.
The question, then, is not so much whether an assignation is neces-
sary, but rather which one. How do we choose the best one? How do
we suspend, in a determined context, the injunctions which are not good
and keep the others? It is here, in this dilemma, that political invention
is necessary; for there is no pre-existing rule, there is no norm to tell me
which assignation to apply. In each case, I alone must invent the best
possible invitation before a given other, a given guest.
Invitation and Visitation
The word “invitation” (which seems so indissociable from hospitality

that politicians and jurists will tell you that immigrants were not invited
. . .) poses the problem of knowing whether the definition of hospitality
must be attached to the situation of invitation: someone is at home [chez
lui], has their house, their culture, their language; they invite someone
else to move in, but on the condition that “their home” remain “their
home,” their language remain their own, their culture, their republic as
well . . . Is that hospitality? Or is it not rather the opening for “visita-
tion,” for the arrival of that other who is not invited, not expected, and
who turns up without my having prepared any structure for his or her
welcome?
There is pure hospitality only when I welcome not the invited guest,
but the unexpected visitor, who invades me, in a certain sense, who
comes into my home when I was unprepared. And I must do everything
necessary to adapt to this person, to transform my home, to let my home
be transformed so this unexpected visitor can move in, as threatening as
that may seem.
These two conceptions of hospitality are in competition and, to a
certain degree, in conflict. The political, juridical, and social experience
162 Interviews
of hospitality is always an unstable compromise, difficult to stabilize and

express according to its fundamental rule.
This reminder of the two competing principles of hospitality responds
to Marius Alliod’s comments on the Hôtel- Dieu and the French
Revolution. Listening to him, I wondered if he didn’t regret the end of
the tradition of the Hôtel-Dieu, that hospitality that alienated the other
by committing them in advance to renounce their civil identity and
rights and to become a sort of dead person, if he didn’t regret the end
put to this system of gift and counter-gift.
Perversion and Perfectibility
Perhaps this is where we encounter again the question of the third party
[tiers] which we will probably have to speak about again. Someone
said that a certain Levinasian ethics seemed in contradiction with
republican citizenship. I do indeed believe that there exists a tension
between a certain ethical purity (defined by Levinas) and law [droit].
But Levinas also strongly insisted upon the necessity of defining uni-
versal rights [droit universel], even if this meant suspending the pure
relation of the face-to-face of one with the other, the intervention of
the third party [tiers] (justice, politics, institutions, the State . . . which
he also strongly distrusted, moreover) was indispensable for him. If
the authority of law can assuredly interrupt the dream of the innova-
tive experience of one with the other (beyond all abstract normativ-
ity), if this law can threaten ethics, at the same time it protects against
this pure mortal charity. We find ourselves once again between two
models.
Supposing there could be a stabilizable concept of hospitality, which
I do not believe, it would always already be risking perversion. The
passage from pure hospitality to law and politics is a perversion because
we impose conditions on it. Consequently, it is an appeal to a perfectibil-
ity, to the necessity of constantly, indefinitely improving the determina-
tions, conditions, definitions of family, local, national, and international
legislation . . . Hospitality is thus immediately pervertible and perfect-
ible: there is no model hospitality, but only processes that are always
being perverted and improved, with this improvement itself carrying
risks of perversion.
To return to Abdellatif Chaouite’s remarks concerning the rule of
three days in Islamic hospitality, it seems that this is a pre-Islamic rule
linked to nomadic culture which was later integrated into Islamic tradi-
tion and law. This rule prescribed that nomads who had lost their way
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would be received by other nomads for three days. Hospitality was

unconditional for these three days, after which the guest had to leave.
Here we once again encounter conditions on hospitality which remind
me of a text by Kant on universal hospitality: States around the globe
should offer hospitality to any arrivant, provided that this foreigner
behaves appropriately and peacefully, and that he or she is not there as a
resident but as a visitor. To grant someone residence, special agreements
between States are necessary.
Definitive or long- term residence is thus a matter of negotiation
between States. In the name of “perpetual peace” and “universal hospi-
tality,” Kant thus posits strict rules and limiting conditions.
What happens with the nomads after those three days? Can we call
hospitality the welcoming that stipulates: “You are welcome for three
days”? We once more return to the work on conditionality, which
belongs par excellence to the domain of the polis once conditions are to
be found.
Responsibility and Hospitality
The title proposed for this session contains not only the term “hospital-
ity” but also “responsibility.”
The word “responsibility” contains “response:” it is a matter of
being able to respond to a call or to respond for the self. But the word
respond is heavy with meaning: it is not only a question of exchange,
recognition, and respect for the other. The injunction to respond, let
us not forget, can also be an act of extreme violence. This was shown
in the text read this morning by Mohammed Seffahi, in which every
line and every word gave an order to respond for the self, thus and not
otherwise. This system of injunction can claim to situate itself within an
ethics of responsibility: you must respond for yourself, for your identity.
Consequently, the call to responsibility can be just as much the begin-
ning for ethics as that of police or state authority. We must therefore
remain constantly attentive to these risks of perversion of the law of
responsibility.
From the point of view of pure ethics, it is not asked of the arrivant,
of the unexpected visitor, to answer for themselves. The very idea of an
“identity card” is a way of interpreting responsibility. A host who is
purely responsible for their hospitality must prohibit themselves from
calling for the determinate response and for the responsibility of the
other.
To respond in turn to the invitation that was extended to me and to
164 Interviews
the presentations from this morning, I would like to add several proposi-
tions, following the central theme of response.
In Abdellatif Chaouite’s and Patrick Laupin’s presentations, the word
“nothing” was recurrent. The woman said: “Here, there is nothing . . .”
The desert. Patrick Laupin evoked this nothing which is also the condi-
tion of the birth of poetics.
The experience of pure hospitality, if such a thing exists (which I am
not sure of, but it is an indispensable reference point), must begin from
nothing. We must presuppose nothing known, nothing determinable;
no contract is imposed so the pure event of welcoming the other is
possible. Thus the nothing is not necessarily a limit. However, it is an
experience often felt negatively, as poverty, deprivation, and indeed it
often is.
But it is only to the extent that we begin from nothing that the inven-
tive or poetic event of hospitality has some chance of happening.
So, how do we inscribe this within the category of responsibility?
If, hypothetically, I want to present myself as hospitable to an invitee
or an unexpected visitor, to a guest in general, it is necessary—and this is
the condition of all ethical or juridical r esponsibility—that my conduct
be dictated, programmed, or normed by nothing that it makes use of as
a mechanically applied rule. Otherwise, I might seem hospitable, but I
don’t make the decision to be so.
The decision of hospitality asks me to invent my own rule. In this
sense, the language of hospitality must be poetic: I must speak or listen
to the other where, in a certain manner, language is being reinvented
itself. And yet, I will give the signs of welcome (at the border or the
threshold of my home) in a given language, for example French. I do not
invent the language. But still, every time that I say to the other: “Come,
enter, make yourself at home,” my act of welcoming must be like the
first in history, it must be absolutely singular. I say “come” not to a cat-
egory of immigrants, workers, etc., but to you. I must therefore invent
the utterance in which I say it, even though I cannot speak an absolutely
new language.
Responsibility: A Unique Compromise
There is a compromise here, a transaction, between the necessity of

addressing someone singularly in a poetic language, for an event without
precedent, and the inscription of this poetics in a politics, that is, in con-
ditions of existence, laws, structures of welcome, etc.
Responsibility in this context consists neither in inventing a cry that is
165
unpredictable and without precedent, nor in repeating rules or applying

the law, but rather in finding a unique compromise each time between
these two poles: as a French citizen, I must find a connection between,
on the one hand, the system of norms constituted by the language, the
French Constitution, laws and customs, French culture and, on the other
hand, the welcoming of the foreigner with his or her language, culture,
habitus, etc. I must find a meeting place, and responsibility entails the
invention of this meeting place as a singular event.
Naturally, political responsibility does not consist in doing this just
once (which would pertain to grace and not to politics), but in creating
juridical situations that are relatively controllable, normed, and stable
so these inventions are easier, so the crossing of differences has a more
favorable chance.
It is not simply about—even if it might also be about—individual
invention concerning the grace of one day, of one meal; rather, it is
about accepting the transformation— which can be profound and
lasting—of this language, this culture, this style, these laws . . . with the
least violence possible.
The response to the responsibilities that you have to take, in this field
of experience, cannot simply stem from your individual genius, from
your gift, when you are faced with a moderately or profoundly disabled
child, of poetically inventing a chance to give them the ability to write.
You also have typical and general responsibilities that do not occur
through the singular face-to-face, but through collective places, through
media.
As for the crossing of languages, which transforms both the idiom of
the receiver and that of the person who arrives, it occurs through col-
lective works. There exists music and song in which Arab and French
traditions and languages are crossed: this is an example of the poetic
transaction between several traditions of music and song. Their crossing
leaves not only individual but cultural traces.
Faced with this transformation, the question arises of general
politics and social responsibility in the welcoming of this kind of

invention. Some do not support this transformation, and others take
responsibility to accept it and fit a pedagogy, a political discourse, and
eventually laws to this becoming. This is where responsibilities are the
most difficult.
A paradigm for these difficulties in France appears in the religious
question. The seemingly most tolerant discourses are measured against
the principle of secularity [laïcité]. Islam is accepted as one of the largest
religions in France, but on the condition that it doesn’t interrupt the prin-
ciple of secularity according to which there supposedly exists a clear and
166 Interviews
rigorously traced border between public and private life: this discourse
is defended equally on the right and the left, in the name of republican
principles. But what happens to a culture and tradition where the prin-
ciple of secularity (with its distinction between public and private) is not
valid as it is in republican France . . .? Must the arrivant be required to
bend to the rule of the distinction between private and public, the legacy
of a long history which does not in any way count as a natural state of
affairs? What should the receiving host do when the very principle of
his or her hospitable generosity is not shared by the arrivant? Or when
the arrivant uses violence? I obviously do not have ready-made answers
to these questions. It seems to me that we would have to evaluate the
conditions in which this conflict can arise, and find the least repressive,
least violent, and least reductive manner to deal with it.
When the principles governing the life of the nation-state can be called
into question by the discourse of foreigners, serious questions arise. The
same is true on an economic level, when the apparently and supposedly
most generous hosts make themselves the most restrictive (for example,
Rocard saying that France could not welcome all the world’s misery) . . .
Which responsibilities to take on the basis of this evaluation? The limits
of the division of wealth and labor are not at all natural, they imply
evaluations, engagements, decisions.
Recall the article read this morning by Mohammed Seffahi regarding
the crime of illegal hospitality. We see there that the “Debré Laws,”
against which many of us have risen up, were preceded by an old litany
of laws that were just as repressive, as early as 1938. Even according
to the tradition to which France claims allegiance, and which calls itself
nobly hospitable and exemplary for Europe, foreign considerations
have always prevailed over ethics—economic and political conditions.
The scandal of the Debré Laws lies also in its way of designating a
scapegoat.
The Host with Two Faces
To echo Patrick Laupin’s concern about translatability, and because

many of us are thinking of Algeria, I would like, by way of illustration,
to recall a story by Albert Camus, “The Guest,” [“L’Hôte”], from the
collection Exile and the Kingdom. The word “hôte” is immediately
untranslatable. The English edition translated it as “guest”—the invited
guest [l’hôte invité]—whereas in French, hôte concerns both “guest”
and “host;’ the English translation, by opting for the word guest, is
already falling short in hospitality by losing a resource from Camus’s
167
text. This loss affects not only one word, but an entire dimension of the
story and one possible reading. It is a good example of how a translation
can be a phenomenon of hospitality or rejection, a misunderstanding of
hospitality.
In this text, Camus evokes the world of colonization: the reading
of this story brings together a sort of metonymy for what was called
“French Algeria;” we do not know who is the hôte, the meta-hôte. By
highlighting this point, I would like to mark the fact that all reflection on
hospitality is very rapidly confronted by two strange reversals.
You mentioned the first this morning: it concerns the transformation,
the contamination of hospitality by hostility.
And more radically, this displacement is due to the fact that the law
of hospitality (in the sense that Klossowski brought to light in The Laws
of Hospitality where there is a man, his wife, and the hôte) leads to a
situation where the inviting, welcoming host becomes the invitee of his
invitee. He finds himself in the situation of being received in his own
home because of the mediation of the person who arrives in his home.
The possibility of welcoming foreigners does not necessarily expose
one to a threat, a risk of aggression or disorder. More radically, it con-
stitutes a chance, given to the welcoming host, to have access to what is
their own place. I would not be what I am and I would not have a home,
nation, city, or language if the other, the hôte, did not give them to me
by their arrival. My language is always the language of the other, not
only because I inherit it but also because the foreign hôte gives it back
it to me. It is a chance for the appropriation of what is “my own.” The
places of the inviting and invited are thereby exchanged. This is, moreo-
ver, what is intolerable for those who believe they can be themselves, at
home, identical to themselves, before and outside of the arrival of the
foreigner.
Being at Home in the Home of the Other
Camus never says who is the hôte, this is his genius. Daru, a teacher in a
village, is giving a lesson on the rivers of France. (I personally remember,
having lived in Algeria until the age of nineteen, how we were taught the
geography of France, but never that of Algeria, how we had to practice
drawing the rivers and tributaries of France . . .). While he is in his class
teaching French geography, we see crossing the village and appearing
before him a French police officer with the Corsican name Balducci and
an Algerian man with hands tied. The officer asks the teacher to lodge
the prisoner so he can be sent the next day to the police station that is
168 Interviews
a few kilometers away. During a brief scene that lasts a few pages, the
teacher, respectful of the laws of hospitality and a certain fraternity,
refuses to hand over his anonymous guest, the Arab. The officer insists
and leaves, leaving the teacher with the Arab.
So the French teacher cohabitates with the Arab, his prisoner hôte,
his hostage, for a day. Is he the hôte in the sense of a guest or a host?
The colonizer is also a hôte in Algeria and the Arab is at home, he is the
indigenous one. “The country was like that, a cruel place to live, even
without the men, who didn’t help matters. But Daru had been born here.
Anywhere else, he felt exiled.”1 The French colonizer is at home, but in
the home of the other, the home of the Arab, and that’s what hospital-
ity is: to be at home in the home of the other without either side being
secondary. The hôte is the hostage of the accused whom he is holding
hostage. And Camus writes, “No one in this desert, neither he nor his
guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert neither of them, Daru knew,
could have truly lived.”2
After this there is a very dense scene where the only words
uttered—not exchanged, but u ttered—to the guest are “hello,” “come
here,” “come,” “go,” “let’s go,” “take” (dates, bread). Daru finds
himself isolated by the responsibility that he must assume: will he
hand over the Arab, who is both hôte and hostage, to the police? Or
will he let him leave? All responsibility is taken alone. Whether there
are norms before me or whether I invent them, even if I give myself
the illusion of applying them, I must always assume my responsibil-
ity alone. Daru does not know what he will do; he feeds his guest for
a time, he accompanies him outside the school and leaves him free to
choose between two laws, the law of the police and the law of hospital-
ity, strongly rooted in nomadic culture. “‘Now look,’ said the teacher,
and he pointed to the east, ‘that’s the way to Tinguit. You’ve got a two
hour walk. In Tinguit, there’s the administration and the police. They’re
expecting you.’”3 Then, he does a quarter turn to show him the other
way, the way of freedom, a barely outlined path which must therefore
be invented. “The Arab was looking toward the east, still holding the
packet and the money against his chest. Daru took his arm and turned
him, a little roughly, toward the south. Below the peak where they
stood, they could make out a faint path. ‘There, that’s the trail across
the plateau. A day’s walk from here you’ll find pastures and the first
1 Albert Camus, “The Guest,” Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Carol Cosman (New
York: Vintage, 2007), 69.
2 Ibid., 77.
3 Ibid., 84.
169
nomads. They will welcome you and give you shelter, according to their
law.’”4
The teacher took responsibility for letting the guest freely decide. Two
solitudes: that of the teacher, and that of his hôte, his hostage: double
isolation. Daru, the hôte, allows the Arab, the hôte of the hôte, the
hostage of the hostage, to make the decision alone at the crossroads of
a story that ought to remain his own. He alone takes responsibility for
his path: to deliver or be delivered. Once the Arab makes his decision,
Daru is alone, “his heart aching,” when he “discovered the Arab slowly
making his way along the road to the prison.”5 “Behind him, on the
blackboard, among the meanderings of the French rivers, a clumsy hand
had traced in chalk the inscription he had just read, ‘You turned in our
brother. You will pay.’ Daru was looking at the sky, the plateau, and
beyond at the invisible lands that reached all the way to the sea. In this
vast country he had loved so much, he was alone.”6
Terrifying solitude of someone who has decided to allow the guest to
choose his path; he sees that, with the guest having chosen the path of
the law of the police, he had become guilty in advance. This is the aporia
of responsibility.
To respond to Abdel Hammouche, I am, like him, very sensitive to
this indispensable conditionality, this mediation of hospitality: there can
be no hospitality that is not already conditioned and mediated by a third
party. The succession of laws on immigration, before the Debré Laws,
would deserve lengthy analysis: it is profoundly marked by the eco-
nomic determinism of the immigration of workers who are exploitable,
usable, assimilable. Though there hasn’t been an increase in the number
of immigrants for decades, today we pretend that this is still a problem,
an allegation which, it is true, could not have been credible in a period
of growth and economic euphoria. To this first field of economic deter-
minants is added the European context, the adaptation to the Schengen
Agreement, and the legislative modifications that follow from that.
Existing legislation is inoperative, impractical, and constructed on false
concepts that don’t match the economic and social reality of France. The
inadequacy of laws and the persistence of the causes of the unemploy-
ment crisis oblige politicians to pretend to reinvent, to substitute one law
for another, each as inefficient as the last.
4 Ibid., 84–5.
5 Ibid., 85.
6 Ibid., 86.
170 Interviews
Local Invention and Cities of Refuge
The relationship between the national scene and the local scene that
Abdel Hammouche emphasized, while very important, is nonetheless
only an indication (even if I think that ultimately we cannot separate
them) of what is being sought today in the experience of hospitality,
immigration, the relation to the foreigner. Indeed, there are norms in
gestation that no longer depend on the nation-state as such (which, in its
current configuration, cannot solve these problems). Hence, the call for
autonomy, invention, and initiative on the local level (private, familial,
municipal, a city compared to a State, a State compared to Europe). We
clearly feel that the gesture of hospitality must not depend on anyone
other than the host. Thus the idea of cities of refuge, proposed by the
International Parliament of Writers, refers to an old biblical or medi-
eval tradition according to which a city, independently of nations and
the State, can take the sovereign initiative to welcome anyone it wants
without relying on legislation from the State. In the biblical tradition, the
divine order allowed a city to serve as sanctuary, asylum for perpetrators
of involuntary homicide pursued by the family of the victim. The tradi-
tion of political asylum belongs to the same spirit: one welcomes into
one’s home the person who is persecuted on the other side of the border.
Thus we have tried to think today about what a local sovereignty
that grants hospitality without referring to the State could be. Let’s have
no illusions about the concrete and large-scale possibility of such local
autonomy. But in tomorrow’s Europe, when it comes to immigration,
national and transnational legislation will need to accept the possibility
of sovereign initiatives on a local scale. The whole problem, which is
that of all desire for hospitality, is finding its juridical translation and
formulation.
But, on the other hand, if I only receive those I am authorized to
receive, it is no longer hospitality. Responsibility is situated at the cross-
roads, in this tension between the anarchic principle of hospitality and
the national or transnational political principle.
Discussion: Hospitality without Conditions
I was wondering if there isn’t a paradox in your position when you

highlight the conditional character of hospitality on the one hand, but
you ultimately conclude by advancing the principle of anarchy. Is this an
unstable compromise, a paradox, a contradiction? How can we manage
these two positions?
171
Jacques Derrida: Well said: it is a paradox. If there were only conditions

for hospitality, or, on the contrary, only poetic invention, there wouldn’t
be any actual hospitality. So there must be a compromise that remains
to be invented: it is neither the pure upsurge of the poetic source, nor the
calculation of law or economy, but the right intersection of the two that
takes responsibility for defining the best possible law so there will be
the most possible hospitality, all while knowing that the law will never
suffice.
Responsibility resides in this decision to invent something new, new
conditions, new laws. The invention of a single instance, without pos-
sible repetition, is not hospitality, only the hospitality of a passage that
must be confirmed.
Anarchic invention does not then suffice any more than, conversely,
mechanical invention could suffice for conditions of welcoming, devoid
of heart. We must therefore, at every moment, invent the new in repeti-
tion. We are already familiar with this in our social lives: when I invite
someone, the invitation must both be interpretable and it must each
time be unique. An invitation out of politeness is not an invitation, and
yet I must be polite while inventing the politeness of each invitation: a
singular greeting.
Yes, it is paradoxical, it is the paradox of hospitality. The same holds
true when I address you: I speak to you and not to another, but for you
to understand me, I must make use of the normed system of language.
To return to your citation of Camus’s text about the teacher’s choice in

favor of the responsibility to a so-called guilty subject, I’m thinking of a
phrase in Lacan’s work on criminology, according to which responsibil-
ity is a punishment. The teacher chooses punishment.
JD: I cannot engage with a text by Lacan that I do not know. As for
Camus, he doesn’t say that the teacher chose punishment: he thought
that he ought to leave the other, the guest, free to choose faced by two
laws. I am free, in embracing my responsibility, to let you leave, rather
than doing what the police officer asks of me. You are free to choose.
The terrible part of this story is that the Arab chooses to turn himself in
to the police, he freely chooses to make himself prisoner.
As for the connection between responsibility and punishment, to feel
free and responsible indeed signifies having to answer for something vir-
tually, before any act. To be virtually indebted before the law, under the
law, and in a certain sense, beholden and thus guilty. This is what many
philosophers have described as an originary guilt: we are accountable,
responsible, and indebted even before doing anything.
172 Interviews
There is no choice between the law and inventiveness or creation. These

two elements from which hospitality is constructed can be considered as
values. A value is at once something that one does, for which one takes
responsibility, which constitutes the subject while referring to something
that escapes us, which concerns the other, all others. It has seemed to me
since this morning that we have established a false opposition between
the demands of the law and those of singularity. It is not possible to
oppose them. But perhaps we speak this way because we have not yet
managed to articulate them.
I would like to know what is a sovereign city in relation to the State
and to individuals, to subjects. In what sense would this be a new solu-
tion with regard to the traditions of hospitality?
JD: Perhaps we have not sufficiently spoken about this question (we
never speak of it enough) concerning the connection between universal-
ity and singularity, but it seems to me that we have engaged with the
subject to some extent.
I don’t know what the notion of value adds to all of this. As for me,
it is a notion that bothers me. The word “law” is always conjoined to
“universality,” but the law is also an imperative. For example, the order
to offer a singular hospitality is also an imperative, a law. It is a universal
law that concerns singularity.
It is still possible to call “value” what I evoked regarding culture and
language, and which must be put in play in hospitality. But the word
“value” inspires some concern in me because of what it introduces of
relativity, or else evaluation in the economic sense as calculation.
With responsibility situated in compromise, in transaction (which
should above all not be understood here as something mediocre), it
is thereby possible to define what has the most value: this (positive,
legislative) law is better than that other law. For example, I hope the
laws that will replace the Debré Laws, even if they aren’t totally sat-
isfying to me, will still be better and will constitute a more acceptable
compromise.
To respond to your question about cities of refuge and sovereign
cities, supposing that this kind of municipal sovereignty is even possible,
it would signify the reconstitution of a new State, beyond the laws of the
French State. A politics of cities of refuge, in my opinion, can only be a
provisional strategy with a symbolic import, intended to combat intoler-
able state legislation, following the example of what is named the call
for “civil disobedience,” though always in the name of a superior law,
implicitly inscribed in the country’s constitution.
173
I return to the translation of hospitality as positive law. You have said

that unconditional hospitality constitutes, in itself, a peril. Does respon-
sibility come down precisely to managing this peril? Policies transform
total peril into a controlled peril.
JD: Pure, unconditional, or infinite hospitality cannot and should not

be anything other than exposure to risk. If I am sure that the arrivant
I receive is perfectly inoffensive, innocent, and beneficial to m e . . . it is
not hospitality. When I open my door to someone, I must be ready to
run the greatest risk.
Politics, for its part, begins where I don’t have the right to favor situ-
ations of risk or to take risks for others; I don’t have the right not to
try, to a certain degree, to calculate risk. But between the xenophobic
extreme right and a xenophilic and hospitable leftist politics, the calcula-
tions of risk will be different, even if they exist in both cases.
This calculation has a paradoxical character: pushed to the extreme,
let us imagine that to obtain a comprehensive insurance policy, I close
the borders, seal them shut, and I do the same with cultural, linguistic,
and other sorts of b orders . . . t hen the country would die. Consequently,
to avoid the supposed risk of death posed by too many foreigners, the
organism dies. It is an organism that wants to protect itself by blocking
all its orifices: death is certain!
Accordingly, the calculation of risks is very difficult: calculation of
health or calculation of being exposed to the arrival of the other, to
the (calculated) risk of the arrival of any sort of peril. It is on the basis
of this calculation that responsibility is assumed; there is responsibil-
ity because this calculation integrates something incalculable. The
other is, by definition, incalculable. This is the fact of our common
experience in the domains of the market, science, etc., and not only
in that of immigration. When an organization invests money in sci-
entific research, it can invest in useless research, and lack money for
more useful research: our calculations must integrate a margin for the
incalculable.
Decision and responsibility are beyond knowledge (which one must
accumulate in order to take it into account). There is a point where deci-
sion and responsibility can only be taken in a space heterogeneous to the
field of calculation and knowledge. This is where hospitality is situated:
I must know that by allowing the other to enter, anyone could arrive,
and anything could happen. Without this, there is no hospitality. The
other remains the other. Even in the political domain, there cannot be
responsibility without this. The other always arrives, in any case: hence
the multiplication of laws: “clandestine” immigration is irreducible, and
174 Interviews
if the other were not from the Maghreb, they would come from inside
the country: the other arrives in any case.
We are speaking a lot about the other; but in a debate about hospital-
ity, shouldn’t I first welcome the other that is in me? What is strange,
foreign, inadmissible in me.
Doesn’t the encounter with the other first pass through a hospitable
psychic attitude more than through words?
Isn’t the acceptance of the stranger in me the condition that makes
hospitality possible? Isn’t one of the difficulties defining the limits of
the intervention of the third party [tiers]? These limits can be symbolic
rather than concrete laws to be applied.
JD: I believe that hospitality indeed implies, both for the receiving host
and for the received guest, first of all, being hospitable to the other in
onseself. Xenophobic and anti-hospitable behavior can moreover be
understood as the behavior of people who have difficulties with the
stranger in themselves, with their own phantoms, whereas people who
have the taste, talent, or genius for hospitality are those who accept
multiplicity in themselves, who know how to deal with the stranger in
themselves, in multiple forms. Language is also, in a sense, the stranger
in oneself since it concerns a heritage made of things, forces, and motifs
that I did not choose and which constitute others, the other. The ability
to welcome depends on a certain plasticity in people who know how to
deal with themselves, who are more free, and who have a good relation-
ship with their inner society.
The psychoanalytic register has dealt at length with this aspect of the
question, and the political treatment of hospitality cannot ignore this
dimension, in the psyche of citizens and in the state of society, concern-
ing the relationship to the stranger (who might also be the ancestral for-
eigner: France is composed of many foreigners). The hospitality offered
to those who come from beyond the borders first implies an inner hospi-
tality with regard to one’s own others.
But we must not give in to the easy solution of wanting to privilege
one’s own others. I have my other and there is the other who is more
other than my other. That’s where the problem becomes difficult.
The last part of my question concerned the difficulty of defining the

limits of hospitality, with the intervention of a third party in a com-
munity of individuals. I was wondering if these limits shouldn’t main-
tain the character of a leap (saut) or a seal (sceau) that is symbolic and
unspeakable. Like those people you mentioned who know how to live
175
with the stranger who is in themselves, without naming it, the same
applies for at the level of law; otherwise they are only formulated, con-
crete, and enclosing laws.
JD: What is terrifying in this logic of the gift, of hospitality, is that even
the value of generosity is suspect. If I welcome the other out of generos-
ity because I am good-natured, or even because I have an overabundance
of things to offer and I can host them, that is no longer hospitality. We
know this well: countries give themselves welcoming legislation when
they have the economic, psychological, and sociological means to do
so. Levinas says there is hospitality when I welcome more than I can
welcome, beyond my capacity: one must give what one does not have. If
I give what I have, if I welcome foreigners because there is work to give
them, because I need them, it isn’t hospitality: hospitality is not found in
my generosity but beyond my nature.
That’s another paradox and a terrible law of hospitality: if I just do
what is possible, then I do nothing. I must do the impossible . . . but is
the impossible possible?
In our turbulent times, is our society capable of allowing itself to think

in terms of the innocence fused by the gift and the counter-gift, rather
than in terms of suspicion? Hospitality is also about learning to know
oneself through the other. What do you think of this phenomenon
of turbulence in our society? To be able to “otherize” [“s’étranger”]
oneself, one must grant oneself a certain kind of innocence. Is this pos-
sible and imaginable, insofar as we are confronted by policies that seem
to be ossifying day by day, and which consider the foreigner as someone
outside of the norm, outside of law?
JD: Let me come back to the notion of turbulence: there is and there
must be turbulence, even if the horizon is peaceful. There is no hos-
pitality without turbulence and without the risk of transformation, of
tremors, without exposing one’s own home to turbulence. I don’t know
where there is innocence. If it consists in being surprised, amazed by life,
by oneself and the other, then yes. As for the gift and the counter-gift,
the system of exchange and circulation does not belong to the domain
of hospitality. Pure hospitality is a gift without return, without calcu-
lation for return. But no system, no society as such has ritualized the
gift without the counter-gift. The gift as I’ve defined it, the gift without
return, doesn’t exist as a norm, as a social prescription: it breaks the law,
the social gift. It is an an-economic experience that can find no political,
juridical, or economic incorporation; never will legislation integrate the
176 Interviews
necessity of giving without compensation, without control. And yet it is

a law, an injunction, which says, “give, without return, without thanks.”
Welcome, Ethics, Law, and Politics
Jacques Derrida: I feel profoundly in agreement with everything you

have said.
The fact that the word “immigration” is dropped and the question of
differences is re-interiorized should lead us to reconsider or see reappear
the question of thresholds, not in the sense of borders through which
foreigners arrive, but within a nation, a society, a culture, where alter-
ity is produced or reproduced. Hospitality does not only concern the
foreigner.
I was wondering what meaning to attribute to the fact that social
workers exist within a society. It does seem that, faced with the prob-
lems of thresholds of hospitality, society needs to establish a corps of
citizens whose mission is to watch over the passage of these thresholds,
in the best conditions. Beyond their broad array of functions, all social
workers share the mission of facilitating the passage of these limits
(whether economic, professional, social, or religious . . .).
Given this, the fact that a society needs to massively develop a corps
of social workers refers to what you called the politics of alterity. We
have seen in France in recent years the confrontation of two conceptions
of politics: the republican model and that of democracy. I understand,
in this context, democracy to represent what you evoked through com-
munitarianism and minorities. In republican discourse, these minori-
ties risk bringing us closer to the situation of the United States, where
some would oppose the universal republican model in the name of their
minority position.
I would also be somewhat favorable to a pragmatics (must it be quali-
fied as republican or democratic?) that would attempt to articulate at
every moment the republican principle and the democratic principle: it’s
difficult.
As soon as we evoke the idea of a pragmatism, the suspicion of
empiricism is raised, of playing it by ear. To escape both empiricism and
relativism, a pragmatics of responsibility must be attuned to principles
that take an unconditional and invariable form. What principle of a
politics of alterity could govern such a pragmatics? That gets us back to
the same difficulties!
If responsibility aims at the event that must come rather than death,
ethics for its part seeks maximum alterity, and the principle of pragmat-
177
ics would therefore prefer the production of alterity to reproduction.

But the implementation of such a politics is very difficult because it must
also be the best possible compromise between relative stability and the
production of alterity. Because a certain level of reproduction must be
maintained. The production of alterity must also ensure the best possible
economy of the level of reproduction. This is the dilemma.
The response, once more, cannot be normative. Besides, if a norm
could define the best authorized production of difference (its social,
poetic, literary forms . . .), there would no longer be a place for respon-
sibility, technics would reign, and politics would be the mere exercise
of knowledge. Norms produce experts. The production of alterity must
be an invention of norms that allows for the exercise of a true political
responsibility, far from total abandon to technology and science. This is
where the problem is posed of reconciling the stability of a nation-state,
a republican concept, and a permanent invention of norms. Anarchic
savagery could become imperious.
The Democratic Challenge
The question today is that of knowing whether hospitality pertains to

politics and thus to the State. “Civil disobedience” poses the question of
whether as an individual I have the right to act other than as a citizen:
to invite whomever I want into my home, even if it is against the law.
When Kant says that hospitality must be universal, but only on this or
that condition, he is talking about the hospitality of the citizen.
But through its radical production of alterity, shouldn’t hospitality
go beyond legislation, as a challenge to the State? This is not a question
of anarchy in the Romantic sense of the term from the late nineteenth
century, but of a concept of the political that would establish solidarity
and alliances beyond any given nation-state. From this perspective, we
could institute an international politics that wouldn’t be political in the
traditional sense, that is, subjugated to the State’s authority.
The idea of democracy (as opposed to the concept of republic) brings
a kind of challenge to the Republic and traditional politics, something
which is difficult to reconcile with political duties.
When I ask for the modification of French law in order that hospital-
ity better conform to what it ought to be, it is the responsible citizen,
affirming his desire for responsibility, who expresses himself; on the
other hand, there is someone who is more than a citizen, endowed with
a freedom to act, speak, or receive whomever he wants in his home,
regardless of the laws of the country where I am a citizen. And in doing
178 Interviews
so, I am thereby claiming to appeal to another politics, to another defini-

tion of politics.
Michel Wieviorka: I feel close to what you have said. How far can we go
in search of compromises, formulations, and reconciliations?
In our country, I believe there is a massive phenomenon of de-
institutionalization: institutions are in the process of coming apart.
Rather than validating this phenomenon, we must ask ourselves if
it is possible to undertake a re-institutionalization that wouldn’t be
connected to the State: for example, would it be possible for state
schools to reground norms which are not those of the State, the
Republic?
Production of the “Subject”
MW: I wonder if a central criterion for making this compromise pos-

sible is knowing to what degree a given effort is or is not productive of
a “subject” in the given form of exchange and self-transformation. Isn’t
the principal criterion for the “citizen beyond the citizen” that you’ve
outlined this formation of the subject?
Concerning the theme of disobedience, I didn’t feel that by signing the
appeal I was in pure disobedience because, in reality, what I am criticiz-
ing is the right wing, and I am asking the left to behave differently. In
other words, I was indicating an ethical position which I was transform-
ing into a political position. Perhaps, in the reality of this kind of act,
there are ideals that aren’t necessarily absolute!
JD: Indeed, if you put my back against the wall, I wouldn’t have the
means to host fifty people. With this gesture, I first wanted to mark a
strategic and tactical challenge. But at the same time, if I am looking to
justifying myself de jure, I am not calling for civil disobedience regarding
general law, but specifically with regard to this law here, in the name of
a superior law that it flouts.
MW: I don’t understand why the qualifiers “pure” and “infinite” are
added to hospitality, why can’t we talk about it as such? Why add these
heavy qualifiers?
Concerning the production of alterity, it seems to me that the point is
less to produce it (alterity exists de facto) and more about recognizing it.
Even if I generally adhere to your position regarding civil disobedi-
ence, what would you think if the same arguments were used by the city
179
of Toulon to justify its politics of national preference, in the name of

civil disobedience and local sovereignty?
JD: I didn’t say that I was in favor of pure hospitality, but if we accept
the hypothesis that there is such a thing, I said what it ought to be. The
words “pure” and “infinite” translate unconditionality. The question
is what happens when conditions are imposed: do I not wish to extend
hospitality beyond certain conditions? When I receive someone, I don’t
ask him or her to make a commitment, I don’t set out my conditions.
Hospitality is impure as soon as I add to it requests, demands, etc.
“Infinite,” which goes with “pure,” simply marks the fact that the
other, who is not infinite, is nonetheless infinitely other. The other is
irreducibly other, alterity is not measurable: the other is wholly other.
According to the hypothesis of pure hospitality, I want to offer my
house, my home, my language, my nation, but I must offer more than I
can give to someone who is absolutely other and without limits. Either
hospitality is unconditional and unlimited, or it is nothing.
Even if there is no need to add a theological dimension to this, it is
nonetheless possible that such a discourse leads to a theology if we give
hospitality a sacred character that pertains to religiosity (to be distin-
guished from positive religion). When we tell someone who arrives,
“you are home,” there is something religious, sacred, related to the
infinite. The words are assuredly heavy, but they must not be avoided.
The opposite position would affirm that there is never hospitality,
there are never gifts, but only exchanges, commerce, and ruses: hospital-
ity would be nothing more than an economy, and henceforth it would
be finite. On the other hand, if something is conceived beyond economy,
exchange, and the counter-gift, then it concerns the gift, the pure, the
infinite . . .
You are right about civil disobedience: the same argument has been
used by the right, against the peril of the extreme right. This is why it is
essential to specify that we are not calling for civil disobedience as such,
we are not inviting anyone to disobey the law, but we are saying that
this particular law, in the name of another superior law, is bad. But a
contrario, under the pretext of not playing into the extreme right, I am
not going to accept the Debré Laws which themselves already play into
the extreme right!
MW: To respond to your question regarding an alterity that already

exists, examples of the production of alterity can be found in the fact that
people discover their homosexuality, they become Buddhist, etc. There
is production with respect to a prior situation, there is the invention of a
180 Interviews
particular and collective alterity. As for describing how this h

appens . . .
these are complex processes and mechanisms. The production of alterity
is characterized not only by its emergence but by a demand to exist in
public space, not to remain confined to private life.
JD: The current debate concerning gender equality in political bodies is

a nice illustration of this question. Élisabeth Badinter, for her part, chose
the republican response when she affirmed, “you are reconstituting a
community of separated women.” So it still remains to interpret the
strategy of gender equality: is it mathematical parity imposed systemati-
cally, or is it parity used as a strategic instrument intended to modify,
in a voluntarist manner, a situation in which men are dominant? In this
debate we find the same pair, republic–democracy.
When you say that hospitality involves giving more than one possesses,
wouldn’t that ultimately imply giving what one is?
JD: Yes. I think that one must indeed give more than one has, and thus
touch on what one is, transform and change oneself. If I give without
allowing myself to be affected by the other, there is no hospitality. But
the problem is not settled for all that because there are several ways to
give: I can transform myself by giving of myself without being over-
whelmed or altered, while retaining control of my property, remain-
ing polite, social, and without radical conversion: this is the common
meaning of hospitality. In the same way that one must give beyond what
one has, one must give beyond what one is: to be transformed beyond
what one can anticipate, to allow oneself to really convert, to accept that
the other affects me to the point that I can no longer find my bearings, to
the point that the reappropriation of my being is no longer assured, and
thus to the point that I might be put in danger. The gravest risk touches
my own identity. Is this possible? I don’t know. But this is the equivalent
of giving more than one has, from the point of view of being.
Here too, we are touching on the boundaries of mystical and religious
experience: the exposure to the other is to receive the “visitation;” when
the Messiah comes, when an absolutely unexpected other appears, I
am exposed. Or rather, I am exposed because I am in passivity: it is my
being itself that is given, I don’t even give it, it is given. I don’t even get
to decide: I make a decision which is made in me by another.
This is indeed the paradox of the decision: even though it engages me
and defines my responsibility, my decision is a decision of the other in
me. For there to be a decision (if there is one), it must tear the course of
time, it must be irruptive. It cannot be the simple development of what I
181
am capable of doing, a simple unfolding of my potentialities. The deci-

sion is so radical that it can only come from an other in me. I am free
and yet I am passive in relation to this decision which tears me up, which
interrupts my own continuity. The paradox is that when the decision
arises, one is both fundamentally responsible and not responsible: the
decision is made. Hence the idea that it is of the other. Likewise, to give
of oneself in hospitality is to decide to expose, offer, and give oneself,
but this decision cannot remain my own because if I remain master of
this decision, I give nothing. The decision transports me, it carries me
further than myself.
It seems to me that you are broaching the question of the place of

the feminine, the place of the passive. It also seems contradictory to
approach it on a political level, when it concerns making the leap, taking
action, especially collectively. Sexual difference is indeed the major
alterity. Taking action on the basis of this place of hospitality would
be the major risk, then, the risk of losing the capacity for hospitality or
for insult. Is it utopian to think that these two psychic postures can be
realized?
JD: Not only do I lack the criteria, but the criteria can’t say if such a
thing tends to happen. If we had criteria to say whether it happens,
that would be the best condition for it not to happen. There is no pre-
established norm. Sexual differentiation is certainly fundamental, but I
would be very careful about associating the feminine with the passive:
it is a topic of debate. It is true that in our societies politics has been on
the side of activity and the masculine, and the place of women has been
relegated to the private and passive. It is a prejudice and an enormous
phantasmatic, ideological, religious, and political machine that we must
shake up.
Mr. Wieviorka, I would like you to explain what you mean by a politics
of alterity. Erving Goffman speaks of a politics of identity in his book
Stigma, in which a group of stigmatized people play on their stigmas in
order to reproduce them. I would like to know if what you understand
by the politics of alterity approximates this, and if the term “politics”
leads in the direction of a voluntarism, where people could recog-
nize themselves as actors in this politics rather than being its passive
“victims”?
MW: For me, the “politics of alterity,” which is perhaps not the best
expression, is related to the meaning of democracy. Our country has not
182 Interviews
thought about the political conditions that would allow people to affirm
their existence as subjects who are capable of recognizing themselves in
a cultural identity. According to what conditions is this possible, and
to what extent? It seems to me that it is more of a horizon than a real
possibility.
Our country has great difficulties understanding a certain number of
groups who are asking to exist within their cultural particularism For
me, this would be the first question for a politics of alterity.
JD: The same cleavage exists within militant groups (homosexuals and
others) as to whether it is better to advocate for uniting differences
to better fight against the dominant world, or if it is better to ensure
preventing the reconstitution of separated identities, following the
American model.
MW: The tension between these two logics can even be found on the
individual level: one pushes toward a communitarianism and the other
toward individual integration . . .
Part III
Europe
Chapter 11
Thinking Europe at Its Frontiers

(1993)
“Intervention,” in Penser l’Europe à ses frontières (La Tour d’Aigues:

Editions de l’Aube, 1993), 19–36.
Derrida’s comments were presented at a colloquium entitled “Le
Carrefour des littératures européenes,” held in Strasbourg, November
7–10, 1992, on the question of Europe.
First of all, I will hazard some preliminary questions: more specifically

about the very place of the preliminary, namely the threshold which
would also be, as always, the step. For example, the step or the steps of
Europe. It is indeed the form of the place, the very figure of hospitality
which is offered to us here for discussion. The threshold and the door,
the doorstep.
The organizers of this meeting asked, indeed suggested, that we open
the discussion with some preliminary reflections that they themselves
initiated in advance, and in a decisive or determining way, by a title,
and under this title, and by some phrases. From this title and these
phrases, I retain, firstly, and this will surprise no one, that Europe is
named in them. What does that mean, “Europe is named”? A passerby
would say, whether they are naive or cunning, a Strasbourgian Socrates
for example: since Europe is named by these people, and they are so
numerous, and moreover, since for some years there have been similar
conferences in all the large capitals of what they precisely and calmly
name “Europe,” we must assume that, like every time that one names,
something exists, before and outside the name to which, as they say, the
name refers, toward which the name is borne.
A name, especially a proper name, is borne: by and toward someone
or something. It is borne by the presumed bearer, who is presumed and
Translated by Caleb Salgado. All notes to this chapter have been provided by the
translator.
186 Europe
stands under the name that they wear like a hat as close as can be to their
head; and then a name, especially a proper name is borne toward, and
it is the movement of reference, a Latin word family that bespeaks the
movement of bearing [porter], with all its modified figures of transport-
ing, deferral, bringing back, exporting, importing, deporting, supporting.
And we could play at taking stock of all the essential phrases we could
make, in a language, in one language dominated by Latin, in order to
write a report, precisely, on yesterday’s Europe and today’s, on what
Europe’s own reach [portée] really is, using only these verbs: to relate
[rapporter] (for example to itself: what does Europe relate, and relate to
itself, how does it relate to itself?), to export (for example out of itself:
what does Europe export, and to where, to what? And what if that which
it exports were precisely itself, the idea of its identity, of its telos, of its
supposed exemplarity? Why was Europe first an export?), to deport
(for example, outside itself or within itself: and what if Europe were the
history of an incessant series, by definition an open series of deportations,
violent ones, of people or peoples, out of their supposedly proper place,
so much so that the very idea of European place would be exposed, mor-
tally exposed, to the history of deportations that had always begun and
never finished?). We do not have time for all these questions that are like
variations on the bearing or the reach of the name of Europe or about the
fact that Europe’s large capital cities are ports, some inland ports (such as
Strasbourg), others exterior ports, gateways to the supposed non-Europe
to which Europe had often already exported itself (Athens and Piraeus,
Rome, Amsterdam, London). And concerning this topic, I would like
to risk this perhaps unsustainable aphorism that Europe is, first of all,
the colonial idea, the idea (and I am still speaking Latin) of culture as
colonization, the colonizer being the one who lives as an occupier; and
if the idea of colonization as such is a European idea, perhaps Europe
itself, this total and limitless colonization, will have begun with Europe
itself. Europe has perhaps always been a colony, a colonial ensemble, a
multifarious and heterogeneous colonizing process, a colonizing process
without metropolis or with multiple metropoles, of which the concepts
enumerated in the program for this session represent the phases (Western,
Christian, Imperial, Global, United, Revolution, Imperial Restoration,
Reich, Confederation, etc.). But then if Europe is a colonial idea and if
that begins from an inside that was not yet the inside of anything, one
has to say that Europe is, will have been, and will be a colony of Europe,
and we have to try to understand the absurdity of this expression, all the
more absurd in that there was identity neither on the side of the colonies
nor on the side of the metropoles. I insist on the port and the reach to
recall, if one wanted at all costs to bring back the name of Europe to
Thinking Europe at Its Frontiers (1993)
187
Europe [reconduire le nom de l’Europe à Europe], that the daughter of

Oceanus, the Oceanid Europa had first been carried, kidnapped, and
carried off by Zeus, seduced, one can say, and kidnapped, dragged off far
away (one can therefore say far from herself and her origin), on the back
of a bull, before giving birth to, among others, Rhadamanthus, judge of
the underworld, whom she had from Zeus. Europe is, firstly, the name of
a being subjected to abduction, seduced and deported in a story of water
and a bull, but let’s move o n . . . It is difficult to know whence she came,
where she is going, and to whom she belongs, even to herself.
But it is a certain absurdity of Europe that I would like to speak about
to begin. How to understand this absurdity of Europe? How can a con-
vinced, more or less convinced, European speak about the absurdity of
Europe? I am a more or less convinced European. By calling for a “yes”
vote for the Maastricht Treaty, not that this treaty or the European con-
figuration it drew up appeared sufficient to me, far from it, I believed,
rightly or wrongly, that it was better to oppose a terrifying coalition of
no votes that, playing on the scale of all types of nationalisms or patriot-
isms (from the Communist Party to the National Front passing through
the nuances of the Rally for the Republic1 or the Socialist Party) risked
interrupting a process in the worst conditions and that, on the contrary,
it was necessary to leave open; and if I say that here, it is not in order
to justify a personal position in a referendum, something which few
will be interested in, especially after the fact, but in order to underscore
a motivation or an axiom, namely that it was necessary to leave open,
that leaving an opening open was preferable to stopping or closure.
Some will say that Maastricht indeed closed whereas a “no” vote would
have permitted opening or reopening. In this case, I would have been
mistaken, and would admit it unbegrudgingly. The future will tell. The
future. What I want to retain here, for what follows in the discussion,
and to open this axiom up to discussion, is the motif of the opening and
the future, of what comes and what will come. The question of Europe
could be: why must one prefer the opening of the open? Why should it
be necessary to prefer the future and the coming of the future, the event
and the adventure of the future, rather than its contrary, if there is one.
Why would the argument “I prefer the future, the future is preferable to
repetition” be an argument that suffers no contradiction? I leave these
questions suspended, and come back to the absurdity of Europe insofar
as it signifies a name to come, and about which one understands nothing
and has never understood anything.
1 A conservative, right-wing French political party inspired by the political ideas

of Charles de Gaulle (Gaullism).
188 Europe
Let’s begin again more modestly. This meeting’s program is contained

in a few phrases that all name Europe, not Europa but Europe, which,
I stress immediately, corresponds, like every time that one names a
nation or a state, or even a nation-state, to a peculiar, I would even
say barbarous, in any case abnormal use of language and of the proper
name. Europe, like France, Germany, Lichtenstein, or Luxembourg, is
obviously a proper name and for this reason should only refer to a sin-
gular existent, to a unique identifiable bearer. But normally, one does
not precede a proper name with a definite article. One only does so [in
French] in the case of names of countries, states or nations (la France,
le Liechtenstein). One does not do it in the case of names of cities or
capitals (one does not say le Strasbourg, unless one is indicating a cafe
or boat that bears the name. When one says le Luxembourg it is the
country, nation-state, and not the city named Luxembourg, even if the
city and the country are the same: the two functions are heterogeneous).
So in general and normally, a proper name should not be preceded by
the definite article, except in popular idioms that are tolerated as dia-
lectal deviations, unpoliced and barely polite, like when one says “la
Marie” in French or “la Cicciolina” in Italian where the article precedes
the family name rather than the first name. Yet here Europe, which is
a first name, even a proper first name, sees itself preceded by a definite
article, just like all the states and nations, whereas it is neither a state nor
a nation nor a country nor even a continent. The definite article accentu-
ates rather, even demonstrates the presumption according to which this
name is borne, and is borne toward a referent simultaneously unique,
irreplaceable, and existing. As if one knew what one was talking about
and who or what one names when one says Europe.
As we well know, this is not the case, you know that we have no idea,
less than ever, and that under the name of Europe one cannot under-
stand [entendre] anything that one could agree upon [s’entendre]. One
cannot understand anything that one could come to an understanding
about, and this is one of the reasons why I was speaking about deafness
or absurdity [de surdité ou d’absurdité]. But that is not all.
The definite article has another surprising effect. It seems to imply
that between the name and the referent, the thing that it refers to,
there is a determined or determining meaning or concept. The differ-
ence between the proper name and the common noun, in general, is on
the one hand that a proper name is not translatable (and in this sense
Europe is actually not translatable—Europe, Europ, Evropa are not
stricto sensu translations of Eurôpè, the daughter of Oceanos, Minos’
and Rhadamanthus’s mother; and to the extent that the name is not
translatable, it reminds one that it is connected to the singular existent
189
that it names and that is not substitutable, subsumable under a general

concept: there is no concept of Europe, and it is on the subject of this
singular and irreplaceable being that we are entitled to ask questions
concerning place, origin, provenance, to ask ourselves from whence it
came, where and when it was born, even if one does so while protesting
against the purely empirical and geographical nature of this typography;
and when one accepts the language of birth regarding a singularity,
one also accepts both history and finitude, which is to say, mortality,
the possible end), but on the other hand, the difference between the
proper name and the common noun, is that the latter, by giving itself
the definite article, that is, by agreeing with a presumed concept, also
suggests that the name’s bearer, here Europe, is irreducible to the singu-
lar body of a localizable and finite existence but also carries a concept,
or a spirit, an ideality that infinitely, which is also to say universally,
exceeds its body. Whence the exemplary capitalization of this abnormal
nomination—proper name plus definite article: it accrues the privilege of
the untranslatable proper noun that assigns a place of origin, the event’s
taking place, a body, a nation, a language (we will come back to the
language of languages soon or in the discussion that follows) and on the
other hand the universality of the concept, ideality, spirit, responsibility,
witnessing. So, to limit myself to this feature of the schema thus sketched
out, that would call for hours of reading, if one said Europe instead of
l’Europe, we would be more sensitive to the question of origin that was
asked, we would justify it as it were, but by granting the pure priority of
the proper noun, which is to say its absurdity (because a proper noun is
absurd, it has no meaning, by definition), we would destroy that which
conferred its principle of intelligibility on a history and a meaning of
Europe. But one must clearly note this fact: that which in this doubly
effective capitalization assures the intelligibility or the concept is what
tends to destroy the proper name, to erase or at any rate to neutralize it.
As we are being given a bit of time to get things started, I will restrict
myself to a few, less abstract points of reference.
1. First of all, a sign or a signal concerning that singular moment when

all these questions are being asked, here, now, to us, Europeans or
not. It is the moment when, in Europe or at the edge of Europe,
affecting the fate of Europe or humanity, the only country or the
only state in the history of humanity that ever had as a proper noun
a common noun or a collection of common nouns, the U.S.S.R., the
former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, has just disappeared.
This was a state that had decided, believed itself capable of decid-
ing (and this was a non-secondary aspect of the revolution) to name
190 Europe
itself differently than with a proper noun of a place, a continent

(America or United States of America, for example; and the United
States of Europe would retain their proper name) or nation (there is
the United Kingdom, but we could show that that never designated a
nation-state). In the case of the U.S.S.R., it was a question of naming
itself based on a concept and therefore on a common noun rather
than based on the spirit of a place or people, in the memory of a
place, people, language [. . .]. In a certain sense, one could show,
I cannot do it here, that this effacement of the name, of its proper
name, was inscribed in the European logic of communication of the
noun, the common noun, that is, the concept representing a techno-
theoretical-scientific rationality whose proper name, on the contrary,
marks its limit. And with the self-universalization and internation-
alization of rationality, the common noun opens up to translation,
in the conventional sense of the term, but also to conventionality,
precisely to the arbitrariness and instrumentalization of language. In
a recent article in Le Monde on these European meetings, precisely,
Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe asked himself: “What is the European
spirit after that which is today condensed, for us in Europe (suicide)
and outside Europe (murder), under the name of Auschwitz?” It
is true that a European project, whatever it might be today, if it
does not keep in its memory—I dare not say if it does not take
into account—and therefore does not reflect upon everything that
is condensed under what is called Auschwitz, risks the worst, and
first of all not knowing, no longer knowing and no longer seeking
to know whence it comes and whence it is returning. In a certain
way, one could show that Europe today, here and now, comes from
Auschwitz just as much as from Greece, Christianity, Empires, and
the 1789 or 1917 Revolutions. But by prudently saying “what is
condensed under the name of Auschwitz,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
recalls as well, if I understand him correctly, how problematic this
name is in its reference and precisely as a proper name. The erasure
of the name is at work here, and first of all, the erasure that would
install this name metonymically in place of other names of disasters,
European and non-European ones, and would recenter everything,
all of Europe and Europe alone, around a single crime and a single
foundational trauma on the basis of which it would identify itself,
congregate with itself and relate to itself. But Auschwitz is also the
erasure of the name, the proper name in a different sense. Auschwitz
has come to signify the project of an annihilation that turns to ash
the possibility of memory, name, and testimony. We are asking the
question of Europe, of what calls itself and that is called Europe,
191
today, on the basis of these experiences of the erasure of n ames—of

their event and their possibility.
2. Second point of reference, second preliminary indication. The
program text for this session, through what is perhaps a misprint, at
one point gives itself the question “Whence does Europe come? [d’où
vient l’Europe?]” as a title and another time, the first time, more
interestingly, “Where does Europe come? [Où vient l’Europe?].” In
one case, it is about coming from an origin (where are you coming
from? Greece, Christianity, the Empires, modern revolutions), and in
the other, of coming from an arrival shore, as if we could ask “where
are you coming?” in the sense of “where are you arriving” (arrive
in the sense of taking place, but also to come to its term), and as if
the question “where do you come from?” was actually suspended
on the teleological, eschatological, or messianic question “where are
you going?, where are you arriving?” You will only know whence
you come on the basis of the moment, and therefore the place, from
which you will know where you are going, and therefore your coming
will be structured by your going to come. The opening of your origin
and at your origin will be determined from your end, an end that
does not have to be known, moreover, that is less of the order of
knowledge than that of action, engagement, event, promise, etc.
And the trained philosophers or historians of philosophy (we are not
going to play at that and don’t have the time to, and we ought to talk
about that too in Europe today, about time and public spaces, even
media spaces where the question of Europe can be reflected on and
shared) know that the history of what is called the European idea,
European unity gathered in an idea, whether one refers to Greece,
to some Holy Empire, or to this or that revolution according to the
Age of Enlightenment, this idea of European history, in particular
in the philosophical forms that it took, from Leibniz to Heidegger,
passing through Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Valéry, and so many others,
always determined its meaning and referent (its irreplaceable and
unsubsumable referent, Europe; its meaning, l’Europe, with a defi-
nite article) while simultaneously invoking an archaeology and a
teleo-eschatology, a non-empirical beginning (it is not the continent
or geographical Greece, for example) and an ideal, transcendental,
or ontological end, this end being that which determines the begin-
ning by announcing itself in it and conferring a universal, exemplary
responsibility on what thus became the unique people of Europe, the
existence called to testify, at all costs, to this universal mission, to
this law that was sent or assigned, etc. Within this general and formal
schema, itself immobile, there is all the rivalry that rages between the
192 Europe
forces of appropriation of this European history, between the metro-

poles I was speaking about earlier, between a Greek philosophical
axiomatic (to be brief and succinct), Christianity and its churches
(Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox)—a theme more timely than ever:
we will talk about it, I suppose, as it will be necessary to talk about
yesterday’s papacy, I mean before World War II—and today every
time regarding a “new Europe,” a theist or atheist rationalism in the
style, not of the very protestant Aufklärung, but of the Lumières, a
post-Hegelian and Marxist or neo-Marxist rationalism, all these axi-
omatic metropolitics confusedly and chaotically quarreling about a
sort of hegemony in the social-democratic or Christian-democratic
cacophony which constitutes the distressing concert of European
discourses on Europe (when I say distressing, I am speaking for
myself, of course, I mean distressing to my tired ear, deafened by
the chatter against a background of absurdity. I who am doubtless
the least European of everyone here, and who in short has the most
and the least origin, the most difficulty responding for himself to the
question “where do you come from?”). Yet without rehearsing even
in outline all these exercises that have become, for us professional
philosophers, exhausted and exhausting exercises in the discourse on
European spirit or the crises of the European spirit, I would like to
ask a question, and this will be my third and last preliminary point.
3. This exercise and this rehearsal, which are circles turning around
what, from beginning to end, retains a form that is not coinciden-
tally circular, are possible only in the essential and original crisis
opened up by the apprehension of the name, such as I outlined it at
the outset by speaking about the space between the proper and the
common, which is to say the space of exemplarity. Now today, if one
wants (that’s a hypothesis) something to happen and to come (the
enigmatic preference for the opening and for the future to come [l’à-
venir] that I was speaking about at the beginning), which is to say
if one wants something other to come, and therefore that something
come to the other and from the other, is it not necessary to break
(which does not mean to forget: in order to break it is also necessary
not to forget) with this semantico-archeo-theological circle, with the
idea of a European unity as the unity of a history comprised between
its beginning and its end, and of which the end is announced in the
beginning that it not only grasps at its birth in this manner, but to
which it also gives birth? Basically, if there were such a history,
if there were only such a history (and the idea of history, a single
history, of infinite progress, but according to this circle, as the idea
of politics and various others are ideas that come from Europe), a
193
circular archeo-teleological history, there would be no history, no

event, no responsibility, there would be neither decision to make, nor
the to-come [à-venir]. Nor anything else.
In order for something to happen (the other, event, decision, responsibil-

ity, hospitality, if there is such a thing), another experience of the name
would be necessary. And first it would be necessary to tell oneself that
the meaning and referent of a name are not determined over the course
of an abyssal meditation on origin, provenance, and end, but on the
irreducibly plural and therefore singular uses and functions of a name
that is not exactly proper (as we saw) in the sentences and discourses
which are no longer ordered around a thinkable meaning and end, and
that would already have been announced, henceforth remaining hidden
or encrypted in our conscious or unconscious memory. It is in this other
approach to language, which is perhaps no longer philosophical or in
any case no longer philosophical in a certain sense that destined it to
be primarily the philosophy of Europe, it is in this other approach to
language that one has to become a bit iconoclastic toward European
discourses on Europe today. Iconoclastic toward the names of Europe,
in the name of Europe. Iconoclastic toward what Jean-Luc Nancy called
“the obviousness of Europe.” To achieve this, instead of investigating
to the point of vertigo the presumed and originary identity of Europe,
its cradle or its tomb, its cenotaph, its identity or its identification, is it
not necessary to ask oneself, in irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous
practices, how the name of Europe, or the adjective “European” func-
tions, ask oneself what is irreducibly new in what is happening beneath
official or philosophical discourses that continue to drone on, confuse,
and dispute metropolitics, from the center-right to the center-left, from
the Ecological-Democrat-Christian to the Eco-Social-Democrat. What
democracy are we talking about? (It would be necessary to ask an analo-
gous question about the tradition of the noun “democracy.”)
And then to broach, without philosophical precondition, the question
of what is really happening today beneath these discourses, and to speak
directly about the Gulf War, the war of the GATT,2 media, education,
new nationalist wars, racism and anti-Semitism that are reappearing
everywhere, and about all the “exclusions” that form European practice
today, and even in the name of the United States of Europe. And about
what it would be necessary to do in order to invent a new international
law that, without restricting itself to the current, that is to say European,
concept of its very constitution, of the State and of its sovereignty,
2 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

194 Europe
allows for the transformation of the right to intervene, the right of inter-
position and the concept of “the humanitarian” that at present regulates
it by restricting it, all of this in order to allow for a transformation of the
European and the global stage.
I’ll stop there: I have talked for too long. I just wanted to indicate in
what heretical or iconoclastic sense the “where Europe is coming” could
be understood: not as a reflection on a place and unity of presumed
origins, not as one more reflection on its identity (this concept simulta-
neously obscure and so dogmatic, that one manipulates every which way
as if one knew what it meant, that identity is fine, and that it is simple,
that it is what we need, etc.), but as an analytic intervention in the mul-
tiplicity of irreducible novelties of what comes, what has just happened,
what manages to come [de ce qui vient, vient d’arriver, arrive à venir], in
the names Europe and l’Europe.
Chapter 12
Double Memory; “Old Europe” and

Our Europe (2008)
“Double mémoire” was published in Le Théatre des idées: 50 penseurs

pour comprendre le XXIe siècle, edited by Nicolas Truong (Paris:
Flammarion, 2008), 15–17. It was Derrida’s contribution, a brief
missive, to the Les Inrockuptibles/Festival d’Avignon presented on July
9, 2004.
“La ‘Vielle Europe’ et la nôtre” was published in Le Théatre des idées:
50 penseurs pour comprendre le XXIe siècle, edited by Nicolas Truong
(Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 18–27. Discussion with Gianni Vattimo and
Heinz Wismann.
Double Memory
Old Europe,
I have never been on familiar terms with you.1 I have spent many
years doing what some interpreted as speaking ill of you. For a long
time, I was classed, rightly, among philosophers who organize their
work around a deconstruction of Eurocentrism in all its forms. I remain
in a certain way an adversary of any reconstitution of a Eurocentric
nationalism. That being said, even in this work of deconstruction, I
constantly felt indebted to you, rooted in you, “old Europe,” who gave
me the very resources that I turned against you. I never ignored you or
insulted you, as has been done from Washington. Today, the situation
has changed. I see in you what I would call, taking inspiration from
the name given to an old synagogue in Prague, the “old new Europe,”
Staronová synagoga, a Europe that retains its memory, the good and the
Translated by Caleb Salgado. All notes to this chapter have been provided by the
translator.
1 Je ne t’ai jamais tutoyé: I have never used the more informal “tu” pronoun.
196 Europe
bad, the luminous and the somber. The luminous is at bottom the idea
of philosophy and democracy, even if on occasion I’ve deconstructed
a certain tradition of this philosophy and what used to be conveyed as
“democracy.” May this new Europe retain its luminous memory: phi-
losophy, democracy, the Enlightenment, and even what is called, rather
dubiously, “secularization.” May it also retain its nocturnal memory,
the memory of all the crimes it has committed in history and that were
committed in its name, all those forms of hegemony, colonialism, and,
over the course of this century, all the monstrosities of European totali-
tarianism: fascism, Nazism, Stalinism.
My hope is that from your two memories, and in particular the aware-
ness and repentance that followed what I call your “nocturnal memory,”
you, my new “old Europe,” are striking out on a path that you alone
can blaze today, between American h egemonism—which does not even
respect the international law that it pretends to s upport—fundamentalist
theocracy, and China, which, taking into consideration only the ques-
tion of oil, is already becoming crucial in the geopolitical lines of force
of the present time.
You, Europe that I am wishing for, I am not sure you are the one
taking shape today. But I am still appealing to you, to a Europe that,
from this double memory, proposes what in Specters of Marx I called a
“new international,” and not a “cosmopolitanism,” which still involves
the authority of the nation-state. I believe you should not be another eco-
nomic superpower proud of a new sovereign nationalism, but a Europe
that gives itself the means, including military ones, of marking the future
of international institutions with its influence. May you be committed to
reforming these concepts as you alone can do, and may you dedicate your
forces to the service of a new UN capable of implementing its resolutions.
In particular, I hope that you are able to contribute to guaranteeing the
establishment of a democratic sovereignty worthy of this name in Iraq,
and that you are able to impose a peaceful settlement giving Palestinians
the right to a s tate—that has, moreover, been recognized by the interna-
tional community, including verbally by the Israeli government.
This change of heading implies a “new European political culture”—
these are the words of Jürgen Habermas, that here I make my own, even
if I will not speak as he does of “constitutional patriotism,” because the
word “patriotism” is too charged. But I believe, as he does, that a desire
is necessary in order to commit the hearts, the bodies, the existence, and
the very affects of the citizens of this new Europe. A sense of belonging
must be born, and a certain European affect must come to support this
new alter-globalist politics. To cut a long story short—since this letter
is a telegram—I wish to see a resolutely alter-globalist Europe emerge
Double Memory; “Old Europe” and Our Europe (2008)
197
that would commit all its forces to being exemplary from a cultural
and social point of view. These decisions, nevertheless, do not depend
exclusively on Europe. Beyond the UN, which I respect and whose per-
fectibility remains a work in progress, we have to fight the high authori-
ties running the world (G8, WTO, IMF,2 etc.) and that dominate and
orient international business on the basis of capitalist interests. The new
Europe should call into question, if not the existence, then at least the
politics and orientation of these powerful organizations. By starting to
weigh on them, the alter-globalist movements, still chaotic and disparate
it is true, do indeed constitute the force of the future.
My wish is that you, old new Europe, commit yourself in the direction
of this alter-globalism and that you support it both by your economic
means, or even military ones, as well as by your philosophical ones in
order to suggest new juridical concepts and a new alter-globalist spirit
that takes cultural differences into account, fights hegemonies, questions
the media’s concentration, diversifies and breathes life into this power of
powers. Let debates on these directions, and which I hope will prevail,
begin as soon as possible in Europe.
That’s the telegram, old Europe, that I wanted to address to you, on
the eve of the European elections and the decisive deliberations concern-
ing the new European constitution. A message that some will perhaps
judge to be utopian, but to which I believe I am not alone in subscribing.
I will try to transform this telegram into a real letter at the time of the
meeting that will take place at the Avignon Festival in the context of the
“Theatre of Ideas,” and at a festival marked in particular by the pres-
ence of a young German theatre director, Thomas Ostermeier, the asso-
ciated artist of this new series. I will add that this new old Europe could
initiate a system of support, assistance, and exceptional solidarity for its
artists, and for which the battle of the French theatre contract workers
(intermittents du spectacle) could constitute the premise.
Jacques Derrida
“Old Europe” and Our Europe
Ridiculed by the United States’ Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,

while a large part of the people and its leaders were refusing “the shock
and awe” of the Iraq War, heir to the ideal of the Enlightenment, but
also originating from the ruins of the “century of extremes” that it
itself birthed, “old Europe” who looks like both a stuffy old lady from
2 World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund.

198 Europe
whom one is demanding accounts of her past as well as a “Mother

Courage” to whom one turns for protection against the globaliza-
tion of precarity. Beginning with a dialogue between three European
intellectuals—Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Heinz W ismann—it
is a question of articulating the particularity of European history as
well as the necessity of founding a new European political culture, in
particular through the entanglement of languages, the creation of new
democratic agencies capable of applying their resolutions, or through
the renewed persistence of human and social rights. At a time when
Europe has taken the path toward a broadened constitution, at the
very moment when political apathy, the return of a narrow-minded
nationalism, and the colonization by the liberal economic imaginary
are spreading, while the threatened European social model enters a
phase of active resistance, one must interrogate this besieged citadel,
this rampart of egoism and generosity mixed together, of particular-
ism and universality intertwined. If European history has sheltered us
from the temptation of promulgating happiness in one country alone,
the convulsive times we are traversing force us to question, invent, and
suggest, so that “old Europe,” torn between American hegemony and
the demand of “emerging” countries, can become our own: a figure one
leans on in order to construct a future not destined for consumption.
(July 9, 2004)
For more than forty years, Jacques Derrida’s work has left its mark
on the French and international philosophical scenes. With “decon-
struction,” a unique way of subverting Western metaphysics, Jacques
Derrida invented concepts such as “trace,” “differance,” “spectrality,”
“supplement,” or “phallogocentrism.” From Writing and Difference
(1967/1978)3 to the co-authored work with German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror,4 with whom he’d co-signed
a “plea for a common foreign politics” in Europe (Libération, May
31, 2003), Jacques Derrida never ceased mixing his writing and critical
rereading of the literary and philosophical tradition with an attention
to political matters guiding all his texts and of which Specters of Marx
(1993/1994) or Politics of Friendship (1994/1997) are the obvious
examples. Born in 1930 in El-Biar, near Algiers, Jacques Derrida has
created a work in the form of a self-portrait, to which the film D’ailleurs,
3 For works cited, publication dates are given for the date of (1) the original publi-
cation and (2) its publication in English/French translation.
4 Published as Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
199
Derrida (1999, DVD available from Éditions Montparnasse 2008), by

Egyptian director Safaa Fathy, restores the contours.
Born in Turin in 1936, Gianni Vattimo is a philosopher and Deputy
in the European Parliament (within the European Socialist Party) where
he is notably a member of the commission of culture, youth, media, and
sports. Conceiver of “weak thought” and protagonist of philosophical
“post-modernism” in which active nihilism and the acceptance of a
world without foundations are presented as a possibility of f reedom—for
example in The Adventures of Difference (1980/1993) and The End
of Modernity (1985/1991)—Gianni Vattimo is also a translator of
Heidegger and Gadamer into Italian. He has taught at several American
universities including Yale, UCLA, and New York University, where he
worked in particular in the domain of hermeneutics, which is to say,
the interpretation of the Western philosophical tradition. From Belief
(1996/1999) all the way to After Christianity (2002/2002), he pleads for
a “Christianity without religion.”
Heinz Wismann is a philosopher and philologist specializing in herme-
neutics and learned traditions. Director of Studies at the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, he belongs to the directory
of the Berlin and Brandenburg Institute for Franco-German cooperation
in Europe. Translator and commentator of Ancients (Heraclitus; or,
separation, with Jean Bollack, 1972 and 1995) and of Moderns (Kant,
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Cassirer, among others), he notably directed
collective works such as Walter Benjamin and Paris (1986) or Revision
of History: Totalitarianisms, Crimes and Nazi Genocides (1990, with
Yannis Thanassekos). Born in 1935 in Berlin, an expert on European
education systems, Wismann was charged by the Minister of French
National Education with research into “teaching languages and cultures
from Antiquity,” reflecting on the constitution of a “common branch
of European education,” and has published The Future of Languages:
A Project of Modern Humanities (2004) with Pierre Judet de la Combe.
Nicolas Truong: Jacques Derrida, in response to a suggestion from the

Festival d’Avignon, you wished to address a letter to “old Europe.” With
this singular way of being on familiar terms with the Old Continent,
you write the following: “I have never been on familiar terms with
you. I spent many years speaking ill of you. But today the situation has
changed.” Why has the situation changed? And why have you spoken
so ill of old Europe?
Jacques Derrida: I am going to start from a significant and meaningful

recent fact to which you allude in your presentation. Here it is: I signed
200 Europe
a text and even a book with Jürgen Habermas, the German philoso-
pher with whom I’d quarreled and to whom I was often opposed, in
particular because he had violently criticized me in The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (1985/1987). For many long years silence had
grown between us. Then we met each other in Paris and talked politics.
And it was precisely concerning Europe that we saw a sort of conver-
gence and possible alliance begin to emerge. After September 11, 2001,
we met in Frankfurt, where I was supposed to give a speech. George
Bush’s martial reaction was already being heard all around the world.
He was already launching his slogan-operation of “infinite justice” that
later was exchanged for “enduring freedom” due to objections made
by Muslims for whom Allah alone can distribute infinite justice. In the
text that we co-authored, Jürgen Habermas recalls that it was within
the European countries that belonged to the coalition implemented
by the United States that popular protests against the Iraq War were
largest, and that one had to take into account the fact that never before
had there been such unanimity in Europe. Joined by a large part of the
Spanish, English, and Italian population, France and Germany were
taking a stand against American unilateralism. The European space
recognized itself by rising up against a hegemonic and, in military and
economic terms, a hyper-powerful country that was in the process of
violating the laws and rights guaranteed by the UN and the Security
Council. By flouting international law, it was behaving like a “rogue
state,” a concept referring to states that do not behave democratically
within their borders and do not respect international law beyond them.
Confronted by this massive “rogue state,” a new figure of Europe is
rising up, remaining certainly a friend to the United States but building
itself as an alternative. In my opinion, this simple fact testifies that a new
era has arrived. And the philosophical reconciliation with Habermas on
the political question means that times have changed. I do not renounce
anything about “deconstruction,” and in particular of my critique of
nationalist Eurocentrism. But today it is a question of constructing
another Europe.
NT: Why are you on familiar terms with Europe today?
JD: I usually have difficulty being on familiar terms [tutoyer], and it’s the
first time in my life that I am on familiar terms with Europe in this text
originating from an oral improvisation you were kind enough to edit.
For a very long t ime—and I think I’ve remained faithful to t his—I ques-
tioned European authority, its self-representation making Europe seem
like a geographic unity or a spirit, in the wake of Husserl, Heidegger,
201
or Valéry. I questioned the representation Europe was giving of itself,

in particular through its philosophical discourse. Because philosophy is
European. When I say that philosophy is Greek in origin and European
in essence, I open myself up to misinterpretations and misunderstand-
ings. I myself would apparently be a victim of the Eurocentrism that I
am fighting: there would, then, be no philosophy in China, India, Japan,
etc. I am not saying that. I am saying that there is a form of thought that
we call philosophia and that undeniably has its birthplace in Greece.
And my work has consisted in interrogating this philosophical repre-
sentation of Europe by Europe or this representation of philosophy by
philosophy through its fundamental concepts.
NT: What are the traces of this representation Europe gives of itself, in
particular in international institutions?
JD: International law, such as it exists today and such as it constitutes

the point of reference for international institutions, such as the UN for
example, is constituted and formed by concepts of European origin.
And I tried to reflect on this philosophical, political, military, economic
history of the globalization of Europe, which was only a very small part
of the world, a cape of Asia, as Valéry says. I wanted to understand
how Europe had globalized itself while also simultaneously shrinking
throughout its colonial but also philosophical, scientific, and technical
imperialisms. For me it was, then, a question not only of reflection on
the Europeanization of the world but also its inflection, that is, going
along with a geopolitical transformation that goes through the transfor-
mation of international law and the concepts structuring it.
NT: What are the contours of this Europe you are dreaming of and that
you outlined with Jürgen Habermas, former philosophical adversary
turned political ally?
JD: Since the intervention in Iraq, it seemed necessary to me for two

French and German intellectuals, especially if they were not in agree-
ment in other matters, to work together and suggest the lines of force
of a Europe for whom I feel the profoundest respect, despite the blows
I’d inflicted on her. Not a Europe understood as a configuration of sov-
ereign states jealous of their sovereignty, a colonial and domineering
Europe, but a Europe that would oppose itself to states violating inter-
national law. I therefore do not wish that the Europe to come become a
superpower in competition with the United States, but rather an armed
economic force in the service of a new UN that would not have to call
202 Europe
on American forces or NATO every time it wants to implement its reso-

lutions, as is the case today. A powerful Europe whose economic and
military force would be placed in the service of what Habermas calls a
“new foreign policy.” It’s not a question here of putting the Americans
on trial, nor even American democracy, which remains great despite all
its contradictions. But between what Bush is the metonymy of and fun-
damentalist theocracies, Europe has a role to play. But due to the neolib-
eral majority in the European Parliament, I am not very optimistic. I am
neither optimistic nor utopian. I am simply trying in spite of everything
to define the Europe I dream of.
NT: Heinz Wismann, how did you receive Jacques Derrida’s letter to
Old Europe? And, according to you, what is Europe’s uniqueness and
idiosyncrasy?
Heinz Wismann: What really struck me in the text Jacques Derrida

improvised for you and that he addressed to us is the expression “old
new Europe.” In German, we could say “altneu” (old-new) and would
have an adjective that French cannot form. I feel like saying that Europe
has always been old and new. It articulates in a particular way the rela-
tion to its heritage whose scope it regularly renews. The great European
Renaissance was launched by a heritage out of which it was suddenly
necessary to create something looking ahead to the future. During this
period called the Renaissance, the present was breached by a prestigious
or enigmatic past that was used to invent a future. The same goes for the
French Revolution. Symbolically, the only means of liberating ourselves
from the weight of the present, its immediate hold, is by playing the past
against the present in order to invent the future. That’s what I call the
operative European mode.
NT: Is it this gesture of rebirth which distinguishes Europe from other

civilizations?
HW: When one looks at other civilizations closely, one is struck by the
fact they can maintain themselves and prosper for millennia without
ever having to make this gesture, that presupposes that one is ready to
separate oneself from oneself. It requires that what’s become familiar
and obvious to us cease to exert its hold on our minds, our affects, our
way of being. S eparation—related to the Greek verb krisis, from which
we get the words “critical” and “crisis”—is the key concept. According
to mythology, Europa (daughter of a king of Asia Minor and whose
two sisters are named Asia and Libya) was kidnapped by Zeus who had
203
transformed himself into a bull in order to bring her to Crete, where

together they conceived the first Europeans. What’s striking in this
story is that Europe’s origin is a separation: one leaves the bosom of
family, one doesn’t stay where one is naturally. It’s almost something
like a challenge to the natural order of things. A tiny promontory on the
immense Asiatic continent, Europe cannot be separated from Asia other
than by an act of the mind, by something stemming much more from
history than nature.
NT: Europe would thus be characterized by its critical capacity, which

can also plunge it into crises. But why, according to you, is this European
gesture perfectly incarnated in language?
HW: Each time it’s at the end of a crisis that Europe begins its renewal.
And that’s the reason the formula “old new Europe” seems to me com-
pletely emblematic of its historical essence. Now this gesture of the
Renaissance is inscribed first of all in the relation to language, every time
we feel the need to liberate ourselves from the natural language we bathe
in from birth. Every time we have to extract ourselves from the maternal
language’s interuterine comfort in order to become an adult, we have
recourse to the historical sedimentations of the language that we natu-
rally speak, and suddenly, we make it say something that marks out a
future. I care a lot about the idea of a foundational European gesture
because I am convinced that it is the very principle of all European edu-
cation. Because far from transmitting to us an uninterrupted tradition,
the European pedagogical gesture consists essentially in ripping us away
from the comfort of immediate communication.
JD: I share the idea of separation from oneself as the foundation of

European culture. But I wonder if one can reserve this trait of krisis, of
the critique or separation to Europe alone, because this rupture with
tradition existed in numerous non-European cultures, such as China or
Japan. In The Other Heading (1991/1992), I defined cultural difference
precisely as the possibility of being different from oneself, of breaking
with oneself. There’s no culture without hospitality, without welcoming
the other, without distinction from oneself. That translates itself into the
field of languages: I think that if there’s something that we can’t appro-
priate for ourselves, it’s language. I think that in our Europe to come,
there will be the problem of common language, shared language, multi-
plicity of languages, of exacerbating linguistic nationalisms. But what’s
proper to language is the fact that it isn’t appropriable. The language
I speak, my mother tongue, French for example, is a language under
204 Europe
whose law I exist and that I can’t appropriate for myself. It dictates its
laws to me, it dictates even the revolutions that I will undertake against
it. In other words, my language doesn’t belong to me. This is what I
tried to show from my situation as an Algerian that I recount in The
Monolinguism of the Other (1996/1998): I only have one language and
it isn’t mine. I was born a Jewish-Algerian and speak neither Arabic nor
Hebrew, just French. It’s a particular case for Jews of my generation in
Algeria. Even people who never left their country and only speak their
mother tongue cannot say they possess their language. Language doesn’t
belong to them. It’s on the basis of this difference within speech itself
that tradition or culture is founded.
NT: Gianni Vattimo, what is European identity? And do you consider

the European Parliament a place where the “new old Europe” Jacques
Derrida spoke can come into being?
Gianni Vattimo: Identities are always founded through either a critique

or a dissolution of prior identity. European identity consists in the fact of
not having a natural identity. We do not have a common language. We
do not have a common religion: there are Catholics, Protestants, Jews
and Muslims, etc. The hallmark of Europe is in not recognizing given
values but of wanting to institute them. As a losing candidate in the last
European elections, I wrote a little book on socialism and Europe. For
what reasons? In Europe’s cultural heritage, the values that differentiate
us from the United States are socialist values, namely the sense of the
State and of social security. In the United States, the State comes second.
The pioneers arrive first, then the criminals, then the sheriff, finally the
judge. I do not adhere to the American spirit, but I respect it. And so old
Europe’s values such as mutuality, the sense of the State or the limitation
of economy by law are socialist for me. I fought in the elections for these
values, and I still do not know if my defeat corresponds to theirs.
NT: Jacques Derrida, why do you prefer the term “new international”
to that of “constitutional patriotism” used by Habermas?
JD: I will respond via a detour through the question of cosmopolitism.

I have nothing against “citizens of the world,” but I found this value
insufficient, especially in its Kantian form, for defining a new inter-
national that should be something beyond citizenship. By definition,
cosmopolitanism is the global state whose citizens are humanity. Yet,
according to me, it’s appropriate to avoid a “world government.” So, to
a cosmopolitanism whose spirit I respect, I oppose an International, an
205
alliance beyond citizenship. I also consider the form of the “party” to

be obsolete and no longer the determining component of parliamentary
democracy, even if it lives on and dominates still today.
NT: Is it necessary to redraw new political borders in Europe?
JD: We often speak of territorial borders, in particular concerning

Turkey. Some politicians say that Turkish culture doesn’t belong to
Europe, which is a monstrosity and reveals an abyss of ignorance.
Today, borders are no longer natural or territorial, due to the develop-
ment of media and the Internet. I can consider a distant Japanese intel-
lectual, for example, as being closer to me than my next-door neighbor.
Territory is no longer a founding concept of politics as it was in Greece.
The nation-state was founded on territory and that’s why the notion
of “constitutional patriotism” bothered me. I understood what Jürgen
Habermas meant: that all Europeans adhere to a certain type of ideal,
to a certain figure of Europe, not only abstractly within the space of
formal law, through an embodied desire. But I do not like the word
“patriotism” because it refers to the father. Patriotism for me remains
the nation-state with all these warlike and phallocentric values.
NT: The new old Europe will only be created, according to you, from a
double memory, the “luminous” and the “nocturnal”?
JD: If this new old Europe has the privilege of being able to oppose
what dominates in the United States and in the Arab-Islamic blocs, this
is to the extent it bears these two memories, a good one and a bad one.
The good one is philosophy, science, the Enlightenment. The bad one is
the memory of totalitarianisms, Nazisms, the Shoah, colonial wars. We
retain the guilty memory of this European trauma. It’s on the basis of
this guilt coupled with the luminous memory that we should intervene.
If there is a European future, it will take its impetus from this double
memory. Because Europe must also learn to build itself up in guilty
conscience.
Index
Abensour, Miguel, 147, 148–9, David, Alain, x, 127, 147

151–2, 153, 155 De Gaulle, Charles, 128
Alliod, Marius, 162 Deguy, Michel, 101
Althusser, Louis, 123–4 Deleuze, Gilles, 123–4, 143
Angel, Pierre, 38, 46 Descartes, René, 12, 74
Annan, Kofi, 121 Desgraupes, Pierre, 132
Artaud, Antonin, 124 Dobbels, Daniel, 147, 154, 156
Donnelly, Thomas, 141
Bataille, Georges, 78, 152 Du Bellay, Joachim, 52
Bénézet, Mathieu, xi Dumayet, Pierre, 132
Benslama, Fethi, 66–8
Bergson, Henri, 123, 128 Fathy, Safaa, x, 199
Bishara, Azmi, 96 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 102, 150
Blanchot, Maurice, x, 17, 53, 55, 78, Foda, Hachem, 52–5, 58–9
123–4, 126, 133 Fontenay, Élizabeth de, 147, 149
Bollack, Jean, 199 Forté, Jean-Jacques, 64, 66
Borne, Étienne, 132 Foucault, Michel, 65, 129, 134,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 129, 134, 143, 143
145 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 55, 67, 155
Bourmeau, Sylvain, 127
Bush, George W., 136–7, 139, 141, Gandhi, Mahatma, 110
200, 202 Girard, René, 122
Goffman, Erving, 181
Camus, Albert, 14, 83–4, 166–8, Grisoni, Dominique, 132
171
Chaouite, Abdellatif, 162, 164 Habermas, Jürgen, 121, 196, 198,
Châtelet, François, 102, 150 200–2, 204–5
Cheddadi, Abdesselam, 59 Hammouche, Abdel, 169, 170
Cheney, Dick, 141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 63,
Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 102, 103, 76, 128, 191
144 Heidegger, Martin, x, 30, 55, 63,
Chirac, Jacques, 127, 135, 145 66, 72, 73, 76, 78, 125, 149, 153,
Chomsky, Noam, 129 191, 199–200
Colard, Jean Max, 127 Henrion, Roger, 38
Corpet, Olivier, 101, 107 Hugo, Victor, ix, 17, 18, 22
Index
207
Husserl, Edmund, 56, 63, 73, 76, Nielsberg, Jérôme-Alexandre,

78–9, 93, 125, 191, 200 119
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 55–6, 65, 70,
Jesus Christ, 14 78, 124, 155
Joliet, Jos, xi
Jospin, Lionel, 144 Olievenstein, Claude, 31, 35–9, 43
Joyce, James, 67, 70, 82
Pivot, Bernard, 132
Kagan, Donald, 141 Plotinus, 67
Kamuf, Peggy, 80
Kant, Immanuel, 11, 13, 23–8, 64, Raffarin, Jean-Pierre, 127, 139, 143,
74, 76, 125, 128, 155, 163, 177, 145
191, 199 Richard, Denis, 38, 46, 48
Kilito, Abdelfettah, 69–70 Roudinesco, Elizabeth, ix, 130
Krog, Antje, 113 Roussel, Raymond, 101
Rumsfeld, Donald, 141, 197
Lacan, Jacques, 66, 171
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 190 Saint Augustine, 62
Lang, Jack, 144 Saint Paul, 59, 63
Laupin, Patrick, 164, 166 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 123, 129
Lecourt, Dominique, 102, 150 Schmitt, Carl, 9, 121, 137–8
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 76, 191 Schmitt, Gary, 141
Lenin, Vladimir Illych, 6, 7, 11, 13, Schröder, Gerhardt, 136
20, 23–30 Seffahi, Mohammed, 158–9, 163,
Levinas, Emmanuel, x, 30, 49, 56–8, 166
69, 123–4, 162, 175 Soros, George, 11
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 132
Lindgaard, Jade, 127 Tassin, Étienne, 147, 151–2
Lyotard, Jean-François, 123–4 Truong, Nicolas, 195, 199
Mallet, Marie-Louise, x, 147, 150, Valéry, Paul, 63, 191, 201

152 Valleur, Marc, 38, 46
Mandela, Nelson, x, 108–15 Vattimo, Gianni, 195, 198–9, 204
Marin, Louis, x Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 133
Marion, Jean-Luc, 68 Virieu, François-Henri de, 134
Marx, Karl, ix, 12, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de,
15–19, 28–30, 80–1, 114, 119–20, 129
124, 126, 128, 131, 134, 155, 196,
198 Wieviorka, Michel, 158, 178, 181
Massignon, Louis, 49, 58, 69 Wismann, Heinz, 195, 198–9, 202
Milet, Jean-Philippe, 72–3, 75, 78 Wolfowitz, Paul, 141
Minc, Alain, ix, 3, 5–20, 22, 24–5, 28
Mitterrand, François, 128, 144 Zahi, Farid, 80–1, 85
Moses, 56–7 Zola, Émile, 129

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The Frontiers of Theory

Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at

© The translators their respective translations

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and

ISBN 978 1 4744 1070 0 (hardback)

Series Editor’s Preface vii

PART I What Comes

10. Hospitality ad infinitum (1999) 158

PART III Europe

to that spirit: the continued exercise of critical thought as an attitude

“What comes?” quizzically asks Elisabeth Roudinesco, eminent histo-

1 Jacques Derrida, De Quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), 90;

messages, and documents. In this wide array of texts, all previously

This collection, which contains frequent references to and inquiries

3 On the “perhaps,” see Derrida’s illuminating exchange with Alexander García

The editors warmly acknowledge the contribution of Andrew Kingston

Thinking What Comes (2007)

The solemn and intimidating hospitality of this amphitheatre seems

whatsoever or to any Marxism whatsoever, but to recall together, in or

1. anticipation (fore-­ sight, pro-­

there?,” as a diligent sentinel at a border post ready to fire would say,

bility before what comes. Whether we have a minute or a century at our

names ­like—­I recall a few of t­hem—­a “continent of chaos,” a “world

history from Kant to Lenin (the question “what is to be done?” can

having ever deliberated about it, he decides to make a telephone call or

the market, the deconstructive criticism of the nature/culture opposi-

doubt necessary also to reinvent, and which are in my view indissociable

structuration, another relation to law, to politics, to the State, and to the

to a nation, call addressed to fellow citizens. Minc says, in short: given

(Let me interrupt this quotation for a moment: it is perhaps the implicit

prologue before returning to the question of the three themes or proper

What is to be done—with the question

[What is to be done? To think what comes. Is it necessary? And then,

right away, without dissociating it from sleepwalking, it is to take both,

Where does this aplomb come from, in general?

because we cannot think what comes without projecting or hearing

different places and therefore distinct and sometimes non-­configurable

The question “what is to be done?” is an ethical and political ques-

Now, in the sequence of these three questions, the median question

of possibility of their formation immediately seals their closure. One

new question of “what is to be done?,” the question of the “come”

3 D.I. Pisarev, “Blunders of Immature Thinking,” quoted in V.I. Lenin, “What Is

it to a whole tradition, including Marx’s, Lenin’s, or Heidegger’s, is the

5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh:

“Substitutions,” in Toxicomanie et Devenir de l’Humanité, edited by

Substitution, or substitutions, because there are always more than one

Translated by Bradley Ramos.

agreement or disagreement, what these words mean or what we mean

it, in an ­ experimental fashion, Temsegic, LAAM [levo-­ alpha acetyl

1 Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Rhétorique de la drogue,” in Points de suspension (Paris:

What are these foreign bodies? Well, to be quick, let’s say:

1. the one we call or identify as the drug addict;

1. The first foreign body, which responds to the “who?” question,

2 [Translator’s note] In English in the original.

lucidity, the revolutionary patience and impatience with which he

4 Claude Olievenstein, “Le toxicomane domestique,” Le Monde diplomatique,

very becoming of drug addiction, by the techno-­scientific, biochemical,

In any case, Olievenstein emphasizes this limit, namely the boundary

The “identitarian” worry is not, moreover, the object of a univo-

­ ealing—­in a concrete manner, and in the most dramatic ­urgency—­with

to the turbulent couple “quasi-physico-­chemical-­substitute-­product/

articulate it with the first, that of the quasi physico-­chemical, substitute

8 [Translator’s Note] Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Let Us Not Forget—Psychoanalysis,”

1. anticipation (fore- sight, pro-

names like—I recall a few of them—a “continent of chaos,” a “world

different places and therefore distinct and sometimes non-configurable

it, in an experimental fashion, Temsegic, LAAM [levo- alpha acetyl

very becoming of drug addiction, by the techno-scientific, biochemical,

ealing—in a concrete manner, and in the most dramatic urgency—with

to the turbulent couple “quasi-physico-chemical-substitute-product/

articulate it with the first, that of the quasi physico-chemical, substitute

As soon as, and insofar as, a psychoanalytic tête-à-tête starts up in the

transferential tête-à-tête (even if a phantasmatic third party is at play);

s pecificity of their mission of care (and not as auxiliaries or controllers

in a much less confident manner the sentence that Jean-Jacques Forté

Jean-Philippe Milet has set in motion a powerful and formidable ques-

thought in other languages, non-European languages, in the broad and

Zahi gives me another c hance—and I thank him for it—to express my

translatable—except for what no longer has to do with the intercourse

ilometers away. During a very brief scene, the teacher, respectful of

they may become citizens, subjects of a nation-state. Likewise, I believe

ies. I had no idea—though I already knew, as anyone could know—that

example, depositing its archives at IMEC—when, to my knowledge,