508 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
One can condemn unconditionally certain acts of terrorism
(whether of the state or not) without having to ignore the
situation that might have brought them about or even legiti-
mated them [.. .] One can thus condemn unconditionally, as I
do here, the attack of 11 September without having to ignore
the real or alleged conditions that made it possible. Anyone in
the world who either organized or tried to justify this attack
saw it as a response to the state terrorism of the United States
and its allies.^40But this desire not to disguise the contradictions and paradoxes did
not stop Derrida from stating his commitments clearly:
[i]n this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to
take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation,
well, I would. Despite my very strong reservations about the
American, indeed the European, political posture, about the
‘international antiterrorist’ coalition, despite all the de facto
betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international
law, and the very international institutions that the states of
this ‘coalition’ themselves founded and supported up to a
certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in princi-
ple, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility
in the name of ‘democracy,’ international law, international
institutions, and so on.^41The events of 11 September added particular weight to a notion
that had obsessed Derrida for some years, that of auto-immunity.
He had mentioned it for the fi rst time in Capri, in 1994, at a confer-
ence on religion: ‘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’.^42 To this logic of
self-immunity, democracy must never yield. Even to respond to the
worst, it could never lose sight of its own foundations.
After considerable rewriting on the part of its two authors, For What
Tomorrow.. ., the book of dialogues with Élisabeth Roudinesco,
came out in France in the immediate wake of 11 September 2001.
Published jointly by Fayard and Galilée, it had a big print run, sug-
gesting the high hopes its two publishers had in it. However, Claude
Durand, the manager, accused Roudinesco and Derrida of trying to
‘destabilize Fayard’ with this book. The Paris publishers’ polemics
that had raged eighteen months earlier, during the Renaud Camus
controversy, were far from over, and even political events were not
enough for them to be forgotten.^43
The press gave the book an excellent set of reviews. Christian