erased—and even informs the lovers’ desires” ( 31 ). Derrida’s
comment may be offensive to some, but at least he stops short
of Foucault’s advocacy of decriminalizing rape (because, Fou-
cault argued, sexuality should not be subject to legal regula-
tions). He even, with some hedging, admits that sexual harass-
ment exists.^7
In For What TomorrowDerrida prides himself on his
iconoclasm, reporting that “in the United States, at the law
school of a Jewish university [Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva
University], I used this word genocideto designate the opera-
tion consisting, in certain cases, in gathering together hun-
dreds of thousands of beasts every day, sending them to the
slaughterhouse, and killing them en masse after having fat-
tened them with hormones” ( 73 ). But he seems, provocatively,
to be in collusion with such genocide. Announcing that “I do
not believe in absolute ‘vegetarianism,’” Derrida (who was a
devoted carnivore) added, “I would go so far as to claim that,
in a more or less refined, subtle, sublime form, a certain can-
nibalism remains unsurpassable” ( 67 ).
Derrida’s comments on meat eating and sexual harass-
ment have a casual air. Clearly, these are not his main concerns.
Jewishness, however, is such a concern. Derrida and Roudi-
nesco devote a considerable portion of their discussion to the
Jewish question. Derrida comments that “it is only just today
that, along with others, I am overcome with vertigo before
something that has lately become obvious to me: French soci-
ety continues to welcome back the old demons, particularly in
milieus and in public spaces that, I thought, were safe from
them” ( 110 ). Derrida remembers being expelled from high
school in 1942 , subjected to “daily insults” in the streets, to
“threats and blows aimed at the ‘dirty Jew,’ which, I might say,
I came to see in myself ” ( 109 ). “Anti-Semitism was always ram-
Politics, Marx, Judaism 235