Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

pendix to Derrida,Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan(New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005 ), 181.
5. Bloom, interview with the author (New Haven, 2006 ).
6. Cited in Paul de Man,Critical Writings: 1953 – 1978 ,ed. Lindsay
Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 ), xiv.
7. See J. Hillis Miller,The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trol-
lope, James, and Benjamin(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987 ).
8. See Emmanuel Faye,Heidegger: L’introduction du nazisme dans la
philosophie(Paris: Albin Michel, 2005 ). A summary of the book is contained in
Faye, “Nazi Foundations in Heidegger’s Work,”South Central Review 23 : 1
(Spring 2006 ): 55 – 66. Especially striking are the pro-Nazi passages that Hei-
degger suppressed in 1961 from the published versions of his wartime lectures
on Nietzsche (discussed in Faye,Heidegger, 410 – 59 ). Heidegger’s complaint
about the “Verjudung”of German intellectual life (Geistesleben) occurs in his
letter to Victor Schwoerer of October 2 , 1929 (see Faye,Heidegger, 59 – 60 ).
9. In a postwar exchange of letters with his Jewish student Herbert
Marcuse, who tried in vain to elicit a measure of sympathy from him con-
cerning the Shoah, Heidegger openly compared the sufferings of eastern
Germans, many of whom had been displaced from their homes during the
war, to the attempt to exterminate world Jewry. For him, Germany’s actions
had been no worse than those of its enemies.
10. Francois Cusset’s French Theory(Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2008 ) accuses French intellectuals of abandoning the avant-
garde in order to embrace a fashionable neoliberalism. For Cusset, Derrida
is a shining counterexample to this trend. Francois Dosse’s Empire of Mean-
ing(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 ), by contrast, wel-
comes the new interest in the individual shown by French theorists like Luc
Boltanski, who abandoned the emphasis on the authority of systems so
prominent in Foucault and other radical thinkers.


Chapter 5
Politics, Marx, Judaism



  1. See Emmanuel Lévinas,Nine Talmudic Readings,tr. Annette Aron-
    owicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ), 98.

  2. Susan Handelman, “The ‘Torah’ of Criticism and the Criticism of
    Torah,” in Steven Kepnes, ed.,Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age(New
    York: New York University Press, 1996 ), 226.

  3. Interview with the author, 2006.


Notes to Pages 193 – 224 255

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