the experience in “Circumfession,” the rather cagey autobio-
graphical essay he published in 1992. Derrida relates that when
he asked his mother where she was in pain she responded, still
able to speak a little, “I have a pain in my mother” (Jacques Der-
rida 23 ). Derrida’s decision to write about his mother’s stroke
marked a departure from his previous reticence about his
personal history. He was wondering whether deconstruction
could accommodate a sense of the emotional life, its disap-
pointments and even degradations, along with theories of
signification and différance. Somewhat furtively, psychology
was intruding into the sacrosanct space of Derridean thought.
But the main impulse of Derrida’s thought in the nine-
ties was toward politics rather than psychology. In May 1990 ,
Derrida participated in a colloquium in Turin, Italy, on Euro-
pean cultural identity. He was joined by a group of well-known
intellectuals, including Giorgio Agamben, a Nietzschean
philosopher influenced by Derrida; the social theorist Agnès
Heller, then teaching at the New School; and José Saramago,
the left-leaning Portuguese novelist who was later to win the
Nobel Prize. The time was right for such an event: the Berlin
Wall had fallen, and with it the old division between East and
West. The question of Europe’s future was eliciting newly in-
tense interest.
In his talk in Turin, Derrida looked back to Husserl’s and
Heidegger’s writings of the 1930 s: their reflections, from op-
posing political viewpoints, on the crisis of European civiliza-
tion. He then invoked Paul Valéry’s announcement in 1939 that
“our cultural capital is in peril” ( 68 ). Valéry, Husserl, and Hei-
degger were writing on the eve of an unprecedented confla-
gration, a war that all three knew was coming. Derrida, by
contrast, gave his lecture in the wake of a cold war that was
now, surprisingly and mysteriously, over.
Politics, Marx, Judaism 219