514 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
much wanted the secret to be kept that he was convinced this
was the case. Hence his shock when things came out in public.
During the 2002 campaign, he felt as if he were being punished
for his aff air with Sylviane. For him, it was even more of a drama
because he was very vulnerable to rumours. He sometimes felt
he was being persecuted by people in high places.^56Unlike in 1995, Derrida was not this time a member of the com-
mittee to elect Jospin. He was disappointed by several aspects of
the policies Jospin was pursuing at the head of the government,
especially in the matter of illegal immigrants. Derrida, who was
tending to become increasingly radical, found the actions of the
French Socialists too timid. He was extremely shocked by the
‘partial and at least nominal preservation of the [harsh] “Pasqua–
Debré laws” on immigration’.^57 Derrida was fully prepared to
accept that ‘unconditional hospitality’ was impractical as such,
and that if people tried to translate it immediately into a policy,
it would always risk having untoward eff ects. But while remain-
ing attentive to these risks, he felt that we could not and must not
give up referring to unreserved hospitality.^58 Likewise, Derrida
found it diffi cult to understand the change in Sylviane’s intellec-
tual positions. They had been so close to his own for twelve years:
in contrast, in his view, her recent book Politics of the Sexes was
imbued with biologism and conservatism.
The confrontation between them became public, and was high-
lighted by the dramatic turn of events taken by the election. On 21
April 2002, the evening of the fi rst round, there was a huge shock,
a real ‘bolt from the blue’: the current President, Jacques Chirac,
came top, followed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of the
National Front. That same evening, Jospin announced that he was
retiring from political life. On 5 May, Chirac was elected to a second
term of offi ce with 82.21% of the vote.
Two weeks later, in the feature on him published on the back page
of Libération, Derrida confessed, among several other things, that
for the fi rst time in his life he had not voted in the fi rst round of the
presidential elections, ‘since he was in a bad mood with all the candi-
dates’.^59 The following day, Sylviane Agacinski commented on this
declaration in her journal, which was published a few months later:
I read in Libération that Jacques Derrida did not vote in the
fi rst round as he was ‘in a bad mood with all the candidates’. So
it’s a question of mood, yet again! It’s always rearing its head in
this journal. But I hadn’t thought it could play a decisive role
on election day. Let’s hope at least that the philosopher will
be in a better mood for the second round, when faced with the
candidates Chirac and Le Pen.^60