Man, turning him into an enemy of Nazi anti-Semitism; and
even Heidegger was said by Derrida to be questioning Nazism.
Derrida must have been taken aback by the blurring of
ethical differences he had produced. His characteristic skepti-
cism seemed insufficient to him, and, as before, he turned to
the prophetic approach of Lévinas to attain a wider view. Der-
rida required a supplement, one that would enable decon-
struction to approach politics from a moral high ground,
rather than suggesting that political distinctions are merely
relative and unreliable. Derrida had first discussed Lévinas in
the mid- 1960 s in Writing and Difference(see chapter 2 ). Now,
needing a cure for deconstruction’s relativism, he returned to
his friend’s work.
Derrida’s turn toward ethics near the end of his life was
not, of course, merely a strategic decision about the waning
prestige of deconstruction. He was growing old, and with the
approach of death he was reminded of the responsibilities and
memories that made up his life, like anyone’s. Ethics meant
seeing all this with a new seriousness. Before, he conceived the
disappearance of the self abstractly. Now, however, the end was
approaching in an all too foreseeable way.
The fate of Louis Althusser perhaps played a role as well
in Derrida’s new concentration on final things. After Althusser
strangled his wife in November 1980 , Derrida, his old com-
panion from the École Normale, was one of the few who were
allowed to visit him in the psychiatric hospital to which he was
confined (and in which he wrote his very strange memoir).
After he was released in the late eighties, Althusser could
sometimes be seen on the streets of Paris, startling crowds by
shouting at them “I am the great Althusser!”
In early 1989 , Derrida’s mother suffered a stroke, as a re-
sult of which she no longer recognized her son; he writes about
218 Politics, Marx, Judaism