Specters of Marx 1993–1995 471
‘as if on a school trip for ageing schoolchildren. Except for Derrida,
who turned up with an already full ring-bound notebook. He was
the only one to have done his “homework” – a word he liked.
His intervention was really thought-provoking and triggered the
subsequent discussions.’^30
The title may have seemed conventional – ‘Faith and knowledge’
- but was less so if we take into account its subtitle, with its echoes
of Bergson and Kant, ‘The two sources of “religion” at the limits
of reason alone’. It is impressive in its scope and detail. As was his
custom, Derrida drew on the most tangible aspect of the circum-
stances in which he found himself, insisting on the western and even
European character of a meeting that was claiming, a little hastily,
an international status.
We represent and speak four diff erent languages, but our
common ‘culture’, let’s be frank, is more manifestly Christian,
barely even Judaeo-Christian. No Muslim is among us, alas,
even for this preliminary discussion, just at the moment when it
is towards Islam, perhaps, that we ought to begin by turning our
attention. No representative of other cults either. Not a single
woman! We ought to take this into account: speaking on behalf
of these mute witnesses without speaking for them, in place of
them, and drawing from this all sorts of consequences.^31In ‘Faith and knowledge’, Derrida for the fi rst time develops one
of the key concepts of his late thinking, self-immunity, ‘that strange
behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself”
works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its
“own” immunity’.^32 He also pondered the confrontation between
diff erent fundamentalisms and what he liked to designate – in one
of those portmanteau words of which he was increasingly fond –
as globalatinization, ‘this strange alliance of Christianity, as the
experience of the death of God, and tele-technoscientifi c capitalism’.^33
A few months later, in Naples, not far from Capri, Derrida com-
pleted another important text, Archive Fever. This was the lecture he
was due to deliver on 5 June 1994 at the Freud Museum in London,
as the closing address in the conference ‘Memory: The Question of
Archives’, organized by René Major and Élisabeth Roudinesco.
In it, Derrida conducted a courteous but critical dialogue with a
recent book by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Freud’s Moses: Judaism
Terminable and Interminable. The questions raised by Yerushalmi
were of the greatest signifi cance to Derrida, probably because
his own relation to Judaism was just as complicated as Freud’s.
He would return to the question in his dialogues with Élisabeth
Roudinesco: