the divide between Derrida and Gadamer in their readings of
Paul Celan.) With de Man and Heidegger, the personality of
the thinker himself is at issue. In refraining from judging de
Man and Heidegger, Derrida holds himself to a different,
higher standard than that of the popular press, which was
eager to expose their connections with Nazism. But Derrida’s
refusal, eschewing psychological and ethical criteria, comes at
the cost of explanatory power. In the instance of de Man, Der-
rida is tempted to imagine a heroic inner life for his friend.
Giving in to this temptation, he inadvertently demonstrates
the impossibility of avoiding a myth of the self. Finally, Der-
rida cannot keep de Man’s inwardness cryptic: he tells de
Man’s life story.
An important political event occurred in 1981 .Czech po-
lice arrested Derrida in Prague, where he had gone to teach a
seminar that had not been approved by the Communist au-
thorities. With grim and ironic appropriateness, his Czech per-
secutors planted drugs on him while he was at Franz Kafka’s
grave. Accused of drug smuggling, Derrida landed in a Czech
jail, where he was stripped naked, photographed, and threat-
ened. Derrida, the Czech government knew, had actively
protested the Communist regime and had even organized a
group with the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant and others, the Jan
Hus Association, in support of Czech dissidents. Still the rebel,
Derrida took a risky stand for the intellectual freedom of his
wife’s homeland. He was released only after the intervention of
François Mitterand’s government.
The second important event of 1981 for Derrida was his
debate with Heidegger’s most prominent disciple, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, that April at the Goethe Institut in Paris. Gadamer
was born in 1900 , when Kafka was seventeen years old and
Queen Victoria was still alive. He grew up in Germany before
184 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger