502 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
considerations. Derrida could be very trenchant, but he could also
be a skilled negotiator when the occasion called for it. Depending on
the context, he could be radical or almost consensual, courageous
or calculating.’^20 Avital Ronell confi rms that this episode caused
their respective associates some heart-searching: ‘One could write
an entire history of great men or women [.. .] and their disciples, a
history of associations or dissociations, of gravitational pull. [.. .]
Small groups quarrel and suddenly their leader, Mafi alike, perhaps,
proposes a truce.’^21
One thing is certain: making up with Habermas meant that
Derrida quickly reassumed a position in Germany that he had
lost. Several plans for translation and re-publication saw the light.
But other factors also helped to thaw the situation. After many
years spent in the United States, Werner Hamacher, a follower of
Derrida, had returned to teach in Frankfurt in 1998; he soon invited
Derrida there, to give the lecture ‘The university without condition’.
On this occasion, Derrida met up with Bernd Stiegler – not to be
confused with Bernard Stiegler –, who had attended his seminar in
Paris a few years earlier and now had an important position with
the great publisher Suhrkamp. The Adorno Prize would soon seal
Derrida’s reconciliation with Germany.
From 3 to 5 December 2000, on the initiative of Joseph Cohen
and Raphael Zagury-Orly, the international conference ‘Judeities:
Questions for Jacques Derrida’ was held at the Centre communau-
taire de Paris. Habermas was one of the speakers: others included
Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gil Anidjar,
and Gianni Vattimo.
Derrida’s attitude to every form of communitarianism had always
been ambivalent and somewhat distant. Nonetheless, ever since
‘Circumfession’, in 1991, and Monolingualism of the Other, in 1996,
the question of Jewishness had moved centre stage in his work. But
it had lost none of its complexity, as he acknowledged in the very
fi rst words of his lecture:
Early on, and for a long time I have trembled, I still tremble,
before the title of this conference [.. .] and never has the privi-
lege of a conference apparently addressed to me intimidated,
worried, or fl ustered me this much, to the point of leaving me
with the feeling that a grave misunderstanding threatened to
make me forget how much I feel, and will always feel, out of
place in speaking of it; out of place, misplaced, de-centred,
very far from what could resemble the thing itself or the center
of said questions, [.. .] Is it really to me, at the back of the
class, in the last row, that such questions must be addressed or
destined?^22