The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 501
car. He took me by the arm: ‘You have to realize it’s my life
you’re taking away... If you were to have an accident.. .’ I
could see him in the rearview mirror, continuing to gaze after
the vehicle as it headed off. There was a sense of twilight about
him. His seventieth birthday had been really quite traumatic.^16As he grew older and the thought of death obsessed him more,
Derrida seemed eager to come to a rapprochement with some
of his former adversaries. In October 1999, in New York, he
again met Jürgen Habermas at the home of their common friend
Giovanna Barradori. At this unexpected encounter, Habermas had
the ‘smiling kindness’ to propose that he and Derrida hold a discus-
sion. Derrida accepted immediately: ‘It’s high time,’ he said, ‘let’s
not wait until it’s too late.’ The meeting took place in Paris shortly
afterwards. During a friendly lunch, Habermas did all in his power
to ‘wipe out the traces of the previous polemic, with an exemplary
probity’ for which Derrida would always be grateful.^17
The two men had not been on good terms for over twelve years,
because of the two ‘unfair and hasty’ chapters that Habermas had
written on Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
and Derrida’s stinging response in Mémoires: For Paul de Man
and Limited Inc. Subsequently, though Derrida and Habermas
themselves had remained silent, two rival camps had sprung up
and waged what turned into a veritable war ‘which doubtless gave
people a lot to think about [.. .], but which also harmed a great
number of students summarily required to choose their “camp”
and sometimes being paralysed in their career’.^18 For Derrida, the
quarrel with Habermas had had serious consequences: since the
mid-1980s, access to the most important German publishers had
been blocked, and his infl uence in the German-speaking world had
been greatly hampered.
Their rapprochement was initially brought about on political
terrain. Even during the years when they had been at odds, they had
frequently been signing the same petitions and the same manifes-
toes. Derrida later acknowledged this in a fi ne homage that he wrote
for the seventy-fi fth birthday of his former enemy: ‘I had always
had more than just sympathy, but an admiring approval for the
argued positions that Habermas had adopted in Germany itself, on
problems in German history, on numerous occasions.’^19
In 2000, Habermas and Derrida organized a seminar together
in Frankfurt on problems in the philosophy of law, ethics, and
politics. Alexander García Düttmann remembers the disquiet that
this ‘reconciliation’ spread among the disciples of the two philo-
sophers. ‘This rapprochement irritated me. Philosophically, they
had nothing to say to one another. But politically, okay, they
agreed on several points. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate tactical