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was probably an extra irritant. The question of Jewishness was a
real source of tension between the two thinkers. Lacoue-Labarthe
was not Jewish, but over the years he had become increasingly
philo-Semitic. He felt as if he were experiencing the trauma of the
Shoah in his own fl esh, almost as much as Sarah Kofman was.^28
But Derrida refused to give Auschwitz any absolute singularity. At
a debate at the Collège International de Philosophie, on 11 March
1990, he repeated and clarifi ed his position on the subject, returning
to the debate held at Cerisy ten years previously, after Jean-François
Lyotard’s paper:
When [.. .] I expressed my disquiet at the way all thinking
about the Shoah, genocide, extermination was being centred
on Auschwitz alone, this wasn’t to relativize Auschwitz. To
begin with, the Shoah isn’t just Auschwitz. It wasn’t to relativ-
ize Auschwitz and the extermination of the Jews, it was with
the infi nite respect, the memory, the bottomless pain that this
extermination can arouse in us, to draw from it at least the
lesson that other exterminations have taken place, are taking
place, may take place; and here too the question of the ‘us’
remains open; and if we closed it, if we closed the net at that
point, that would be very serious for reasons that I don’t need
to go into. That’s all. It wasn’t at all in order to relativize or
push Auschwitz into the background [.. .]. Not at all, quite
the opposite. I think that respect for Jewish martyrdom under
Nazism obliges us not to centre all possible martyrdoms on that
one.^29But above and beyond any philosophical or political question,
various personal elements played a decisive role in the confrontation
between the two men. Derrida found the self-destructive aspects
of Lacoue-Labarthe diffi cult to take. Although he was fi nding
it increasingly diffi cult to breathe, he never stopped smoking,
morning, noon, and night, sometimes giving the impression of
someone living through his last days. His problems with alcohol had
become even more worrying. Jean-Luc Nancy sadly remembers:
‘Philippe had started drinking, without us realizing. He drank on
the quiet, mainly white wine and whisky. His alcoholism became
more and more serious and evident, and had a powerful impact on
his character. Nothing and nobody could help him.’^30
Their mutual friends watched helplessly as Derrida and Lacoue-
Labarthe drifted apart. Samuel Weber says: ‘Gradually, relations
between them became more distant, and the clashes more frequent.
And yet there a lot of things that made them similar. Philippe was
more of a poet and artist than Jean-Luc, who was more philosoph-
ical and serious. But Philippe was also more tragic, more depressive.