8 The Derrida International 1996–1999
Derrida’s standing in the French media was gradually chang-
ing, especially now that his political commitments were providing
people with a more accessible image of him. On 1 February 1996,
Libération hailed his recent publications in a double-page spread:
these included Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Aporias, Religion, and
‘Advances’, his long preface to the fi rst work by Serge Margel, The
Tomb of the Artisan God. ‘Psychoanalysis, religion, the concept of
death: nothing escapes the thinking of Jacques Derrida, who can on
occasion show himself to be a demiurge,’ announced the heading. A
few months later, in Le Monde, Christian Delacampagne devoted
a major article to the publication of Monolingualism of the Other,
Echographies of Television, and the proceedings of the conference
‘Passions of Literature’. He fi rst insisted on the sheer abundance
of Derrida’s output, counting ‘sixty-seven books in thirty-four
years, or an average of two a year’. ‘There is something miraculous
in Derrida’s productivity: an ability to renew himself ceaselessly,
a generosity which time seems unable to exhaust.’ Delacampagne
expressed his surprise at the unfair reception given to Derrida, ‘ill
loved in his own country, even though he is at present, together with
Paul Ricoeur, the most famous representative of French thought
in the whole world’. He emphasized what struck him as being the
two current tendencies of Derrida’s work: ‘a penchant for autobio-
graphy, as well as an increasingly marked political focus as the years
go by’.^1
‘Yes, my books are political,’ Derrida acknowledged in his
interview with Didier Eribon.^2 He had long hesitated to intervene
directly in media debates, as the ground seemed to have been under-
mined by the champions of hand-me-down ideas. The trauma of the
nouveaux philosophes was still a sore point, as he explained in a late
interview:
If you wanted to become a media fi gure very quickly, you had
to simplify, talk in black-and-white terms, dump the whole