Derrida suggests, he was (really or covertly) criticizing Nazism,
which is also a philosophy of the human, of “spirit.”
Most fascinating for followers of Derrida’s career is the
very end of “Philosophers’ Hell,” in which Derrida un-
ashamedly signals his wish to be taken as an engaged political
thinker, like Sartre or Foucault. Referring to his two books of
1987 ,Of SpiritandPsyche(the latter containing an essay on
Nelson Mandela), Derrida remarks, “And what if someone
finds amusement in showing that these two texts on the soul
and spirit are also the books of a militant? That the essays on
Heidegger and Nazism, on Mandela and apartheid, on the nu-
clear problem, the psychoanalytic establishment and torture,
architecture and urbanism, etc., are ‘political writings.’ But you
are right, I have never been, as you said, a ‘militant or engaged
philosopher in the sense of the Sartrean or even the Fou-
cauldian intellectual.’ Why? But it’s already too late, isn’t it?”
(Heidegger Controversy 273 ).
It was not too late. Derrida in 1987 was getting ready to
man the political barricades, to steal back the audience he had
forfeited to the engaged Foucault. He was also about to make
an about-face, reclaiming the moral high ground he had lost in
the de Man and Heidegger affairs. Ethics and politics would be
Derrida’s watchwords for the remaining seventeen years of his
life, rather to the surprise of those who had followed the career
of the arch-deconstructionist to this point.
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 215