A Last Call for 'Europe'

It is still much too early even to begin to take the measure of Jacques Derrida’s extraordinary life and work, particularly — as is our charge here—with regard to the political. It is still too early, not just because Derrida’s work continues to be disseminated and read throughout the world, and so continues to have an enormous influence on so many disciplines within academia and so many areas outside it, not just because the institutions Derrida helped found or the causes he championed are still in the process of transforming our world, but, more essentially still, because the “measure” of Derrida’s work is yet to come, or, better, because the measure of his work is the “to come.” It is still too early to assess the significance, to take the measure, of Jacques Derrida’s work with regard to the political or anything else because the event of his work, its living-on, so to speak, is still open to iteration, to reinscription, to a future that might well change just about everything we now think about it.

Such an acknowledgement does little to temper the pain so many of us feel today at the death of Jacques Derrida. The fact that his work lives on in us does little to console us about our total, irremediable loss — a loss that is, in fact, the very condition of this living-on. But then how should we—how should I here, since this responsibility is each time unique—respond to this living-on? Were my pain and sadness not still so acute, I would have attempted, with a bit of distance, a systematic reading of two works I have had the honor and privilege to co-translate and so feel a certain affinity and affection for, Derrida’s 1991 L’Autre Cap (The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe) and his 2003 Voyous (Rogues), two works that would help us measure just how much Derrida’s thinking about world politics in general and Europe’s role in the world in particular will have changed over the course of the last decade of his life.¹

These two works today appear in retrospect as the bookends of a twelve year period that would see the publication of many explicitly political works, from Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx) in 1993 to Politiques de l’amitié (Politics of Friendship) in 1994 to Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (“On Cosmopolitanism”) in 1997,² a period that runs roughly from the founding of the European Union through European and American military interventions in the Middle East during the first Gulf War and in the former Yugoslavia to the events of 9–11 and the various European responses to the U.S. doctrine of unilateral preemption, which, already in the summer of 2002 when Rogues was written, appeared to have already determined the American invasion of Iraq. Whereas The Other Heading attempted to articulate the dangers and promises of a united Europe, a Europe that must, according to Derrida’s maritime metaphor, hold fast to its inheritance in the Enlightenment in order to set sail for a radically “other heading,” Rogues, written in the wake of 9–11, looking back at a first Gulf War and in anticipation of a second, tried to define even more clearly this new role for Europe in an age when nation state sovereignty is threatened by, on the one hand, non-state or extra-state entities such as terrorist networks and anti-globalization movements and, on the other, trans-national corporations and international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization.

Were the sadness not still so palpable, I would have addressed some aspect of these works, some aspect of these contemporary issues and Derrida’s developing thought with regard to them, knowing full well that I must address them today alone, without Derrida, without the help of this mentor’s voice, this friend’s voice, that will have inhabited me for more than two decades. I thus asked myself how else to pay my respects to Jacques Derrida, how else to...