gave a lecture at Cornell called “The Politics of Friendship”; he
repeated it in December at a meeting of the American Philo-
sophical Association. Friendship and politics were the subjects
of his seminar at the Sorbonne the same year. The results ap-
peared in a book,The Politics of Friendship,published in
France in 1994 and translated into English soon thereafter.
AlongsideThe Politics of Friendshipcame a book on Marxism,
Specters of Marx,in 1993. Also in the early nineties, Derrida
began to comment on the political future of Europe, in lec-
tures reprinted as a book entitled The Other Heading.Derrida
had always been diffident about politics, in marked contrast to
the engaged Communists of the rue d’Ulm. But now, late in his
life, he was becoming political with a vengeance.
The explanation for Derrida’s leap into politics is mani-
fold. First, the fall of Communism and the resulting transfor-
mation of Europe seemed to demand the response of major
intellectuals. Second, Derrida increasingly felt the need to
compete with the intensely politicized Foucault, whose star
had been rising ever higher among American academics since
his untimely death from AIDS in 1984. And third, the growing
influence of a new style of criticism, the New Historicism, cre-
ated considerable pressure on poststructuralist thinkers like
Derrida to prove that their movement, for all its indulgence in
rarefied wordplay, was responsive to history and politics.
Finally, Derrida was sensing the impact of the de Man
and Heidegger affairs. His commentaries on de Man and Hei-
degger had implied that the skeptical powers of deconstruc-
tion could, and should, dissolve the differences that remain
central to our understanding of what happened during World
War II: the oppositions between democracy and fascism, be-
tween resistance and collaboration. At the same time, as we
have seen, Derrida developed an elusive secret identity for de
Politics, Marx, Judaism 217