498 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
The interviews were recorded between 20 and 23 May 2000, at the
height of the controversy around Renaud Camus.* ‘On the second
evening,’ recalls Roudinesco,
we were phoned by Claude Lanzmann who was launching a
violent petition against Camus and asked Derrida to sign it.
They had a frank exchange of views. Derrida was embarrassed
at the labelling of such opinions as ‘criminal’, but he eventually
agreed to sign. It was this current debate that led us to add a
whole chapter on ‘the anti-Semitism to come’.^6The death penalty was another theme by which Derrida was
obsessed. He thought about it at length. Since the autumn of
1999, it had been the subject of his seminar. He read and reread a
great number of philosophical texts on the subject, and started his
seminar by expressing his amazement:
To put it in a brief and economical way, I will proceed from
what has long been for me the most signifi cant and the most
stupefying – also the most stupefi ed – fact about the history
of Western philosophy: never, to my knowledge, has any
philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and sys-
tematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as
such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty. From Plato
to Hegel, from Rousseau to Kant (who was undoubtedly the
most rigorous of them all), they expressly, each in his own way,
and sometimes not without much hand-wringing (Rousseau),
took a stand for the death penalty.^7At the beginning of summer 2000, the Estates General of psy-
choanalysis, whose tireless organizer René Major had taken the
initiative, off ered Derrida an exceptional opportunity for develop-
ing these ethico-political questions. On the evening of 10 July, in
- In his Journal for 1984, published in spring 2000 by Fayard as La Campagne de
France, Renaud Camus had written: ‘The Jewish collaborators of Panorama on
France-Culture are going a bit too far, all the same: for one thing, they comprise
about four out of fi ve on every broadcast, or four out of six or fi ve out of seven,
which, on a national or quasi-offi cial station, comprises a defi nite over-representa-
tion of a given ethnic or religious group; and for another, they ensure that at least
one programme per week is devoted to Jewish culture, to the Jewish religion, to
Jewish writers, to the State of Israel and its politics, to the life of Jews in France and
throughout the world, today or through the centuries.’ This passage and several
others – sometimes truncated or transformed – had triggered a widespread contro-
versy, poisoned by publishers who were fi ghting for infl uence. Roudinesco and, to
a lesser degree, Derrida played a signifi cant part in the aff air, which is discussed at
several points in For What Tomorrow....