Specters of Marx 1993–1995 469
clamp-down by the authorities. At the beginning of 1994, he signed
an ‘Appeal for Civil Peace in Algeria’ and spoke in the main lecture
hall of the Sorbonne on 7 February 1994 at a major meeting called to
support Algerian intellectuals. He began by referring to his ‘painful
love for Algeria’, ‘which, though it is not the love of a citizen [.. .],
and thus not any patriotic attachment to a nation state, is nonethe-
less something that makes it impossible for [him], here, to separate
[his] heart, [his] mind, and a political stance’.^21 However diffi cult and
entangled the situation, Derrida refused to soften his usual rigour.
He methodically scrutinized the terms of the Appeal to try to shed
light on what terms such as ‘violence’, ‘civil peace’, and ‘democracy’
actually meant within the Algerian context. He especially insisted
that while ‘voting is of course not the whole of democracy [.. .],
without it, and without this form and this counting of votes, there is
no democracy’.^22
Support for the Algerians had very defi nite implications in
France. With Pierre Bourdieu and Sami Naïr, Derrida, who was
usually so legalistic, did not hesitate to call for ‘civic resistance’
against laws on immigration and nationality as well as the recent
decrees concerning Algerians. On 25 March 1995, during a dem-
onstration in Nantes for the right to visas, he intervened for the
fi rst time in a directly militant way. ‘I found myself there, pushed
up onto – it wasn’t a cask, but some kind of raised thing –, just like
that, to harangue the crowds on behalf of Algerian emigrants,’ he
later recounted.^23 That day, without the least stylistic convolution,
Derrida pointed out that in 1993, France had handed out 290,000
visas to Algerians, and three times fewer in 1994. He denounced ‘the
slamming shut of borders to Algerians who are living in a hell where
there were at least 30,000 assassinations in 1994’.
The more people are killed in the world, the more France,
whether its government be of the left or the right, simply stands
by as a distant, disdainful observer while people are being mas-
sacred. The French Government is so aware of the intolerable
nature of the situation that it has just banned the publication
of the number of visas granted or turned down. Might it be
ashamed of its policy?^24Derrida, who had so often refl ected on writing and the materials
on which language was inscribed, brought out the full resonance of
the very word ‘sans-papiers’,* one of the issues that he constantly
fought for during the 1990s, and one which gradually led him to
move away from the French Socialist Party, which in his view was
- Illegal immigrants ‘without papers’. – Tr.