(conscious or unconscious) and symbolic or symptomatic re-
actions that might take numerous detours, an incalculable
number of them, in truth.... And does terrorism have to
work only through death? Can’t one terrorize without kill-
ing? And does killing necessarily mean putting to death? Isn’t
it also ‘letting die’? Can’t ‘letting die,’ ‘not wanting to know that
one is letting others die’—hundreds of millions of human be-
ings, from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so
on—also be part of a ‘more or less’ conscious and deliberate
terrorist strategy?” ( 107 – 8 ). So (apparently), if I neglect to
contribute to Doctors Without Borders, I’m a terrorist, com-
parable to the suicide murderer on a school bus who fervently
hopes to kill as many children as possible. (Derrida adds
that the members of the French resistance were also terrorists
[ 109 ].)
Derrida’s determination to avoid supplying an overly
narrow definition of terrorism lands him in bleak, skeptical
confusion. If we’re all terrorists, then nobody is. As in his Car-
dozo lecture and other commentaries of the 1990 s, Derrida
prefers to invoke justice on an abstract level rather than con-
sidering its application to actual cases; and this abstracting
tendency leads to a lack of ethical discrimination. Most of us
would agree that the deliberate murder of noncombatants, in-
cluding children, is a greater moral fault than turning aside
from instances of suffering. By demonstrating his lack of in-
terest in such distinctions, Derrida deprives himself of the sta-
tus he aims for: the renowned philosopher pronouncing on
the central ethical issues of our time.^12 At the apex of his am-
bition as a political intellectual, Derrida found himself ham-
pered by his unwillingness to engage in moral judgment.
During these same years Derrida was involved in the
making of a film about his life. In contrast to the conversations
Politics, Marx, Judaism 239