ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODcontext of intellectual activity, such as the kind he was engaged in, was impossible to
ignore. But it was associated more with institutions than with individuals. This is already
reflected in the titlePositions,which, like that ofRoguesmany years later, is not by acci-
dent formulated in the plural, for a certain plurality—and we will have occasion to return
to this—is mobilized throughout his writings to unsettle the unity often attributed to
political concepts in general and to that of ‘‘democracy’’ in particular.
Shortly after these interviews were published, Derrida, with others, embarked upon
a series of political initiatives involving issues that at first, at least, tended to be local in
character: politics with a smallp. The first major project of this kind was the founding in
1975 of an organization of teachers and scholars, GREPH, aimed at elaborating critical
alternatives to a governmental plan to eliminate the teaching of philosophy in the last
year of high school (theRe ́forme Haby, named after the then Minister of Education).
GREPH, which stands for the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy, proposed
that philosophy should not merely continue to be taught in the last year of thelyce ́ebut
be extended to earlier school grades, as well as integrated into professional training in the
fields of law, medicine, and so on. The idea was to question the logic of specialization
that informed theRe ́forme Haby, not just by retaining the status quo but by transforming
it. Another such localized intervention involving the development of border crossings was
the 1985 founding of the International College of Philosophy (CIPh), which was designed
not only to serve as a forum for interdisciplinary study among academics but also to create
the possibility for high-school teachers of philosophy, and others, to pursue research aims
not possible in secondary schools. The conviction that informed the founding both of
GREPH and of CIPh was that the efficacy of political intervention often requires informed
experience of the institutional practices involved, including knowledge of their history
and structure.
Initially, then, and for quite some years, the political dimension of Derrida’s work
was more evident in such micro-political institutional interventions. Although such con-
texts were local, they were tied to larger issues by virtue of being situated within the highly
centralized and hierarchized French state apparatus, which includes virtually all of the
country’s educational and research institutions.
It is this link between the local and the national, between the micro- and the macro-
political—a link that is in great measure a result of the specific institutional situation of
French higher learning and research—that allows and indeed impels those participating
in educational and research institutions, whether as teachers, researchers, students, or
staff, to connect their immediate concerns to much larger political issues, involving the
French state, the nation, and its relation to other nations in an increasingly ‘‘globalized’’
world. One example of this tendency was the April 2006 protests and demonstrations of
high-school and college students—soon joined by many of their teachers, as well as sub-
stantial numbers of workers and their unions—against the revision of the labor law (in
French known as the ‘‘CPE’’: contract of first employment) proposed by Prime Minister
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