V
Politics, Marx, Judaism
n the 1990 s, as he neared the close of his life and his aca-
demic career, Derrida again sought an arena outside phi-
losophy: a wider and more consequential place than argu-
ments about the coherence of metaphysical texts could
provide. His chosen term, increasingly, was politics. And the
accent of Derrida’s political writings was a prophetic one, full
of commanding ethical import. He relied more than before on
a Lévinasian view of our responsibility toward others. Derrida
was no doubt reacting to his own role in the de Man and Hei-
degger scandals, when he failed to confront the political com-
mitments of these two thinkers. Instead, Derrida suggested,
what mattered was that they were alert to the real danger
facing twentieth-century Europe: metaphysical humanism.
Such avoidance of the actual political context of de Man’s and
Heidegger’s careers in the 1930 s and 1940 s risked making Der-
rida seem irrelevant or even negligent, more interested in
words and concepts than in historical reality.
The political turn in Derrida’s work began shortly after
the de Man and Heidegger affairs. In October 1988 , Derrida