also Wendy Scheir and Farnoosh Fathi. Jenn Lewin provided
cheer and intellectual guidance. And completing this book with-
out the presence of Victoria Malkin now seems impossible.
My writing coincided with the American presidential
election campaign of 2008. When election day arrived, I had
just finished the book, with its reflections on the role of the in-
tellectual in public life. On that November night in Brooklyn,
I felt that my country had remade its promise, and that intel-
lectual commitment to our common existence had, perhaps
more than ever before, proven possible in America. The sud-
den awakening of responsibility and hope, larger than the
book I had written, still helped me to frame the experience of
writing it. The basic questions of human identity, political de-
cision making, our curiosity about one another—questions
that Derrida often avoided in the service of a self-enclosed ac-
ademic vocabulary—might, in the end, matter to us all.
x Acknowledgments