Derrida’s guidance for the European future, as delivered in
Turin, seems understated, even banal. “On the one hand,” he re-
marks, “European cultural identity....cannot and must not be
dispersed into a myriad of provinces, into a multiplicity of self-
enclosed idioms or petty little nationalisms.... But, on the
other hand, it cannot and must not accept the capital of a cen-
tralizing authority” ( 38 – 39 ). (Derrida puns incessantly in his
Turin lecture on capital—Latin caput—and head). The author-
ity that Derrida speaks against would be a hegemonic source of
control, which he depicts in Orwellian terms ( 39 – 40 ).
So Europe, Derrida argues, should be neither a mere col-
lection of rival nationalisms nor a centralized structure with a
single capital: “neither monopoly nor dispersion, therefore”
( 41 ). This neither-nor is seen by Derrida as an impossibility,
which he then glorifies as “the experience and experiment of
the aporia,” “the possibility of the impossibility” ( 41 ). Through
these ringing Kierkegaardian phrases, Derrida tries to endow
his rather vague observations with a heroic cast. The core mes-
sage of Derrida’s Turin lecture is an exceedingly general cau-
tion against the dangers of both nationalism and transnational
authority. He offers little practical sense of the main issue
confronting Europe after the fall of Communism: how the ap-
peal of self-isolating ethnic groups might be handled by gov-
ernments charged to rise above, and to manage, such ethnic
particularism.
In October 1989 , Derrida gave a talk at the Cardozo Law
School in New York for a colloquium entitled “Deconstruction
and the Possibility of Justice.” As in the case of the Turin sym-
posium, the theme of the Cardozo lecture indicates that Der-
rida realized the danger to his legacy if deconstruction were to
become merely a proficiency in the art of excuse making, as his
Critical Inquirydefense of de Man seemed to suggest. Derrida
220 Politics, Marx, Judaism