374 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
he took with remarkable seriousness. But for his students, in the
French institutional context, the situation brought several risks. As
Catherine Malabou explains:
Approaching Derrida, and a fortiori writing your thesis with
him, meant you were more or less fi nished in the university
system. In France, everyone who worked with him suff ered
for it. Even now, the label ‘Derridean’ still sticks to me, even
though my work no longer has much to do with his. Every
time I went in front of a panel of examiners, I was given the
privilege of having them ask a few – generally malevolent –
questions about him. Of course, Derrida had sometimes been
provocative, especially towards the Inspection Générale or the
agrégation examiners, but I think that what mainly bothered
people was the independence from institutions that he always
embodied. And it was precisely this independence that I loved
in him. Never have I met anyone less fazed by possible reprisals
or questions of social respectability. He couldn’t stand insti-
tutional obedience getting in the way of thinking, or the norm
winning out over the demands of thinking. On a deeper level,
there’s something in deconstruction itself which tends to arouse
hostility: it’s a kind of approach that generates disquiet.^53For Derrida, deconstruction was still mainly a way of thinking
about philosophy. It was not a doctrine, but a means of analysing
the genealogy of the history of philosophy, ‘its concepts, its presup-
positions, its axiomatics and doing so not only theoretically but also
by questioning its institutions, its social and political practices, in
short the political culture of the West’.^54 This somewhat restrictive
defi nition did not prevent Derrida from exploring new domains and
embarking on hazardous experiences.
Ever since many people had deserted the political fi eld, he
had been tackling it increasingly directly. In 1984, the paper ‘No
apocalypse, not now’ discussed the threat of nuclear war and
closely scrutinized the language being used by the Reagan admin-
istration. Written to accompany a travelling exhibition against
apartheid, ‘Racism’s last word’ analyses the particularities of the
South African regime and the international complicity from which
it profi ted. This was a case about which Derrida felt particularly
strongly. In 1986, he provided a long, powerful piece to the book
For Nelson Mandela in which fi fteen writers – including Nadime
Gordimer, Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, Kateb Yacine, and
Maurice Blanchot – hailed one of the most long-standing political
prisoners in the entire world.
In this text, ‘The laws of refl ection: Nelson Mandela, in