2
From the Heidegger Aff air to
the de Man Aff air
1987–1988Ever since his arrival at the École des Hautes Études, Derrida had
been able to develop a theme of his own choosing, without needing
to bother too much about the agrégation syllabus. The ques-
tion that had been preoccupying him since 1984 had been that of
‘Nationalities and philosophical nationalisms’. Since the autumn
of 1986, he had given this theme a more specifi c twist, giving it the
title ‘Kant, the Jew, the German’. The issues at stake may have been
philosophical, but they were far from academic:
As you have will already have seen, what interests me in this
seminar is the modernity, the past and the future of a certain
couple, the Jewish-German couple that in my view is altogether
unique, unique in its kind, and without which it is impossible
to understand anything of the history of Germany, the history
of Nazism, the history of Zionism [.. .] quite a lot of things, in
other words, in the history of our time.^1Session after session, Derrida patiently examined texts by Fichte
and Nietzsche, Adorno and Hannah Arendt, as well as Richard
Wagner, Michelet, and Tocqueville – not forgetting Heidegger, the
philosopher to whom he returned almost every year, with passion
and tenacity. Claiming that ‘you can think only in the language of
the other’, Derrida was explicitly arguing with Heidegger, who,
in the famous posthumously published interview in Der Spiegel,
maintained that ‘you think only in your language, in your own
language’, and Derrida wanted ‘to demonstrate the privilege, the
excellence, the irreplaceability of Greek and German as languages
of thought’.
In the immediate wake of these refl ections, in March 1987
Derrida gave the closing paper, ‘Of spirit’, at the end of the confer-
ence organized by the Collège International de Philosophie under
the title ‘Heidegger, Open Questions’. Derrida scrutinized the tra-
jectory of the word ‘spirit’ (Geist) both in Heidegger’s most overtly