400 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Habermas’s reputation and his widespread infl uence in Germany
obliged Derrida to respond, especially since some articles attack-
ing him in no uncertain terms had just appeared in the German
press because of the de Man aff air. In the Frankfurter Rundschau,
Manfred Frank said that he was worried that young Germans
might fall ‘into French hands’, extending the suspicion of fascism or
‘neo-darwinian’ pre-fascism to the whole ‘French International’ of
Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard.^50 In the view of Alexander García
Düttmann – who had studied at Frankfurt before viewing himself as
an associate of Derrida –, Habermas explicitly warned his students
against Derrida; at the time, he described his thought as nihilistic,
obscurantist, and politically dubious.
In a long note added to the eventual French publication of
Mémoires: For Paul de Man, Derrida began by waxing indignant at
Habermas’s method, emphasizing that, in one of the two chapters
on him, he is criticized over thirty pages. After pointing out a series
of errors of interpretation, Derrida launched a more frontal attack
on the very principles of Habermas’s philosophy:
It is always in the name of ethics – a supposedly democratic
ethics of discussion – it is always in the name of transparent
communication and ‘consensus’ that the most brutal disregard
of the elementary rules of discussion is produced (by these
elementary rules, I mean diff erentiated reading or listening to
the other, proof, argumentation, analysis, and quotation). It
is always the moralistic discourse of consensus – at least the
discourse that pretends to appeal sincerely to consensus – that
produces in fact the indecent transgression of the classical
norms of reason and democracy.^51All of these themes went to the heart of another important text
of 1988: ‘Toward an ethics of discussion’. This was the afterword
to the book Limited Inc, a collection of the pieces in the particu-
larly violent controversy between Derrida and John R. Searle ten
years earlier. Returning to Searle’s text, ‘Reiterating the diff erences:
a reply to Derrida’, and his own scathing response, ‘Limited Inc
a b c.. .’, Derrida endeavours to analyse ‘the symptoms that this
polemical “scene” can still make legible’, over and above the precise
theoretical contents that were then at stake.^52
Derrida increasingly realized the level of violence at work in aca-
demic and intellectual discussions, including in his own methods.
He explained this in a late interview with Évelyne Grossman:
When I try to think, work or write and when I think that some-
thing ‘true’ needs to be put forward in the public space, on the
public stage, well, no force in the world can stop me. It’s not a