Derrida From Now On

4. A Last Call for ‘‘Europe’’

4 A Last Call for ‘‘Europe’’ It is still far too early even to begin to take the measure of Jacques Derrida ’s extraordinary life and work—and particularly 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, and 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. Were one to give in, however, to the temptation to offer an initial assessment of Derrida’s political thought during just the last decade or so, one would no doubt want to begin with a systematic reading of his thoughts about Europe, starting with his 1991 The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe and going up through his 2003 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. Indeed, these two works today appear in retrospect as the bookends of a twelve-year 81 period that would see the publication of many explicitly political works, from Specters of Marx in 1993 to Politics of Friendship in 1994 to ‘‘On Cosmopolitanism’’ in 1997, a period that runs roughly from the founding of the European Union through the 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, during the summer of 2002, when Rogues was written, already foretold 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 compromised and sometimes threatened by, on the one hand, nonstate or extra-state entities such as terrorist networks and antiglobalization movements and, on the other, transnational corporations and international organizations such as the World Trade Organization or the United Nations. Because my ultimate destination in this book is less Derrida’s Europe than Derrida’s America and the place or fate of deconstruction in America, I will not undertake the kind of thorough and rigorous analysis of texts ranging from The Other Heading to Rogues that would be required to understand the trajectory of Derrida’s work with regard to Europe in particular and the political more generally. I will only say that such an analysis, while concentrating on these later texts, would have to return to the premises of this thinking of Europe in Derrida’ s earlier works, indeed, in some of very first works, especially with regard to European exceptionality or exemplarity.1 But in order to understand Derrida’s developing thought over the past couple of decades with regard to America or the United States, it is important to give at least some idea of Derrida’s thinking of Europe. For if not quite a dialectical pair, Europe and the United States often appear together in Derrida’s thinking, with a certain hope in the one being coupled with a skepticism or growing dissatisfaction with regard to the other. Some hint of this was already provided in the previous chapter insofar as the radical secularity Derrida was trying to think came to be identified, in his final works, much more with...