SAMUEL WEBERDominique de Villepin. The CPE would have allowed employers to fire young workers
employed for the first time without having to justify their action before an independent
tribunal. Confronted by massive protests, the government abandoned the CPE—at least
for the time being.
To return to Derrida: as his international reputation grew, it was inevitable that he
would move from his largely local institutional interventions of the seventies to increas-
ingly global, macro-political concerns in the eighties, whether they involved the apartheid
policies of South Africa or the rights of Palestinians to an independent state. In his writ-
ings, a growing engagement with macro-political questions became legible through a
problematization of the question of nation, nationality, and national languages, and then
through the enlargement of institutional perspectives to more general questions of law
and its relation to justice, but also including questions of copyright, the right of asylum,
and many other issues. Such macro-political concerns, which undertook to reinterpret
practical political questions in terms of the often unthematized and unconscious assump-
tions that made them possible, produced major works such asOn Spirit: Heidegger and the
Question(1987), which examines the political implications of Heidegger’s endorsement of
the notion of Spirit in the early thirties in view of his previous critique of it; or the essays
collected in 1988 asOn the Right to Philosophy. This turn toward what I have been calling
‘‘macro-political’’ questions culminated in what can be considered a final ‘‘political’’ tril-
ogy:Specters of Marx(1993), ‘‘Faith and Knowledge’’ (1996), andRogues(2003). But if
this trilogy can be called ‘‘political,’’ that is only insofar as it enjoins its readers to rethink
the very limits of what has been designated as ‘‘politics,’’ and in so doing to envisage its
transformation. It is significant that all three of these texts grew out of talks that Derrida
gave in conferences or colloquia: his writing remained, in this sense, tied to thesingular
occasions that called it forth, to which it responded but which it also sought to re-
address—that is, to reinscribe in a larger and generally unexpected historical and cultural
context.
To come now to the specific case ofRogues, the situation to which this text both
responds, addresses, but above all seeks toreaddress, was a very particular conference: the
fourth dedicated to his work at the French conference center at Ce ́risy-la-Salle, in Nor-
mandy. It was also to be the last. This possibility endowed the question of time with a
special urgency. But this urgency was not just tied to the singular person of Derrida. Here,
perhaps more than elsewhere, the date cast a long shadow. For the general question of
‘‘democracy to come’’—a phrase that had occurred and recurred in his writing over many
years, without ever having received anything like an extended elaboration—could not be
discussed in the summer of 2002 without some consideration of the attacks of September
11, 2001, and, above all, of their aftermath. To address this situation responsibly and
responsively, could for Derrida only mean to raise questions concerning the discursive
traditions that dominated thinking about democracy and their link to a situation in which
the ‘‘war on terror’’ had become the public leitmotif of the country that had long been
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