Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 399
It was at this meeting of the Collège International de Philosophie
that, for the fi rst time as far as I am aware, Derrida tackled the
theme of the unforgivable, which would assume such a decisive
place in his thought:
I never know who has the right to ask for a confession, if
there is ever a confession, and above all, who has the right to
forgive, to say ‘I forgive’. The phrase ‘I forgive’ also seems to
me as impossible, or at least impossible to assume with any self-
assurance, as impossible as the request for a confession – and
perhaps as the confession itself. And yet I’ve written ‘unforgiv-
able’. I’m not sure I was right to do so and in any case I’m not
happy about it.This decidedly diffi cult period was marked by still more polemics.
Jürgen Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
was translated into French and published by Gallimard in 1988,
having fi rst been published in Germany in 1985. Two of these twelve
lectures were devoted to the author of Writing and Diff erence. But
since, in Habermas’s view, Derrida ‘does not belong to those philo-
sophers who like to argue’, he announces right from the start that he
is going base his discussion on the work of Derrida’s disciples, ‘who
have worked ‘within the Anglo-Saxon climate of argument’.^47 It is
actually Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction on which he most relies.
Since Habermas had always been a fi erce enemy of Heidegger,
the fi liation which he establishes between Heidegger and Derrida is
not in the least a compliment. If we are to believe Habermas, their
two philosophical methods coincide almost perfectly: ‘The familiar
melody of the self-overcoming of metaphysics also sets the tone for
Derrida’s enterprise; destruction is renamed deconstruction.’^48 So,
in the view of Habermas – who is here close to Ferry and Renaut’s
French Philosophy of the Sixties – there is nothing new in Derrida,
apart from the tone, which itself leads to a fateful levelling of the
diff erence between literature and philosophy:
If, following Derrida’s recommendation, philosophical think-
ing were to be relieved of the duty of solving problems and
shifted over to the function of literary criticism, it would be
robbed not merely of its seriousness, but of its productivity.
Conversely, the literary-critical power of judgment loses its
potency when, as is happening among Derrida’s disciples in
literature departments, it gets displaced from appropriating
aesthetic experiential contents into the critique of metaphysics.
The false assimilation of one enterprise to the other robs both
of their substance.^49