516 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
On refl ection, and in spite of all sorts of sincere inner objections
that you can imagine (wouldn’t it be too much? do I deserve
it, does my work deserve the honour of another décade? etc.),
I feel I should accept, as I had intimated to you, the very gen-
erous invitation that has been extended to me yet again. I’m
telling myself that after all, since it will be a matter of shared
work and not of ‘celebration’, since past experiences will permit
us to hope for another ten-day festival of friendship in so many
languages, since the main thing is that we show that we are
worthy of our hosts and the Cerisy tradition [.. .], being with-
drawing or retiring, on pretext of modesty, is not appropriate.
And then, life is too short, and we have no right to deprive
some of our dearest friends of the opportunity these encounters
provide.^64Derrida sent three requests in to the people at Cerisy. The fi rst
two were typical: that the theme was to be ‘Politics of Friendship’
- which struck him as both very political and very open –, and that
Marie-Louise Mallet would once again be the organizer. The third
seemed more unusual:
Finally, if possible, and say this out of a superstitious fi xation
on the past [un passéisme superstitieux], a décade again includ-
ing the birthday date of 15 July would be both practical for
many of the potential participants (those from abroad in par-
ticular) and soothing for my imagination. But this is a sort of
‘whim’. Don’t bother about it if it causes any inconvenience for
the calendar of your programme.
I am fully aware of the unprecedented privilege of this gift
and, without feeling that I really deserve it, I am drawing from
it a great strength in these somewhat melancholy years of my
life which the ‘anniversaries’ of Cerisy will have marked out
and brightened.^65This wish was of course granted. As for the title, it developed some-
what, becoming ‘The democracy to come’, which in his view was not
at all the same as ‘future democracy’. For Derrida, democracy never
exists in the present, ‘but there is the impossible, whose promise
democracy inscribes’.^66 At the opening address, whose propor-
tions fully lived up to those of previous Cerisy conferences, he read
what would be published a few months later by Galilée, as Rogues.
This was a way of rereading his own work from a specifi c point of
view, here political, as he had done with regard to the animal in
- Derrida had recently become much more radical. Following
Chomsky’s ‘terrible indictment’ of ‘Rogue States’,^67 he went so far
as to state: