Night in Prague 1981–1982 341
Hus Foundation resumed almost immediately. As Étienne Balibar,
who played a very active part in it, remembers,
We knew that we risked being hassled, searched, even robbed
of the books we were bringing. But we were convinced that,
after this fi asco, the biggest risks were behind us. Even after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the Czechs and Slovaks didn’t want the
Jan Hus association to cease its activities. Even today we still
continue to help doctoral students.^18Jacques and Marguerite learned what had really happened only
years later, from the lips of Ladislav Hejdánek, the professor of
philosophy at whose home the clandestine seminar had been held.
In 1981, a provincial offi cial had just been appointed to the head of
this local police service. He wanted to draw attention to himself by
some act of distinction and so had set up the whole thing by himself.
Of Derrida he knew nothing, except that he was a member of the
annoying Jan Hus Foundation which was giving support to dissid-
ents. The plot had not been directed against Derrida at all; it could
have been aimed at any other foreign visitor. Knowing nothing
of Derrida’s celebrity, the offi cial had not for a moment imagined
the international repercussions that his arrest would entail. His
excessive zeal backfi red: he was demoted and sent back into the
provinces. And much later, after the ‘Velvet Revolution’, he was
himself arrested for drug traffi cking.
For Derrida, the Prague aff air remained a traumatic memory,
a sort of echo of that grim day in October 1942 when he had been
expelled from the Lycée Ben Aknoun. It was if his entire life had
been ‘framed by two sets of bars, two heavy, metal interdictions’:
‘Whether they expelled me from school or threw me into prison, I
always thought the other must have good reasons to accuse me.’^19
This arrest brought him centre stage, without his having asked for
it. But it was without the least doubt one of the things that led him
to lay himself open more and more, especially in the political arena.
‘All things considered,’ he wrote, ‘my arrest in Prague in 1981 con-
stituted the voyage that, in my whole life, was most worthy of the
name.’^20