Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

pant there [in Algeria],” Derrida says to Roudinesco. “This is
well known” ( 113 ). “Nothing for me matters as much as my
Jewishness,” Derrida remarks, “which, however, in so many
ways, matters so little in my life” ( 112 ). (Derrida married a non-
Jew and, like Freud, refused to have his sons circumcised: a fact
that Derrida mentions in Archive Fever,his late book on Freud
[Jacques Derrida 222 ].)
Derrida and Roudinesco go on to discuss Noam Chom-
sky’s defense of Robert Faurisson. Faurisson was, and still is, a
frequent presence at Holocaust denial conventions. He has
written several books on what he calls the “swindle” of the
Shoah, claiming that “Hitler never ordered nor admitted that
anyone should be killed on account of his race or religion,” and
going on to state that “the alleged ‘gas chambers’ and the al-
leged ‘genocide’ are one and the same lie” (cited in Rising 63 ).
Chomsky not only advocated Faurisson’s right to claim that
the Holocaust had never occurred; he also allowed his state-
ment to be used as a preface to one of Faurisson’s books. In his
preface, Chomsky noted that Faurisson did not appear to be
an anti-Semite, but rather an “apolitical liberal.” Derrida de-
fended Chomsky’s championing of Faurisson, arguing that
Chomsky was merely standing up for an “unassailable” right to
speak. He went on to advocate the dismantling of Europe’s
laws against Holocaust denial: public shaming of Holocaust
deniers, as occurs in the United States, should take the place of
legal prohibition.^8
The nineties were hard times for Jewish causes, in part
due to the influence in the academy of two passionately anti-
Zionist intellectuals, Chomsky and the Palestinian-American
professor Edward Said. Both campaigned for the elimination
of the Jewish state, alone among the nations of the earth; Is-
rael’s very existence was seen as the bearer of a unique evil.^9


236 Politics, Marx, Judaism

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