Derrida: A Biography

The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 511

the slightest Judeophobia, without the least anti-Americanism,

and, as if I needed to add it, without the least anti-Semitism.

Dear Claude, I would have written this to you, as a matter

of conscience and the duty of friendship, at the risk of being

mistaken, even if I were the only person to think it. But I’m sure

you know this, I’m simply reminding you, I am not the only

one, doubtless even among your friends and admirers.^48

At a conference a year after Derrida’s death, Alain Badiou sum-
marized perfectly what Derrida’s line of conduct had been on the
political terrain. Faithful to his long-standing philosophical habits,
he explained, Derrida had constantly sought to undo opposi-
tions that had been fi xed for too long, ‘to unsort what had been
sorted’: ‘In the opposition Jew/Arab, in the Palestinian confl ict,
Derrida adopted the position of deconstructing the duality.’ More
fundamentally, in Badiou’s view:

Derrida was, in all the questions on which he spoke out, what

I call a courageous man of peace. He was courageous because

you always need great courage not to get caught in the division

that has been set up. And a man of peace discovering what does

not fall within this opposition is, generally speaking, the path

of peace.^49

In autumn 2001, politics caught up with Derrida on another level.
Though he had no hesitation about taking up diffi cult positions
on the public scene, the author of Specters of Marx had always
been extremely careful about his image, and taken pains to avoid
anything that might endanger it. For Derrida, the secret was a fun-
damental theme. He saw it as one of the foundations of democracy,
as he explained in an interview with Maurizio Ferraris. He had even
chosen the title Il gusto del segreto for this work (The Taste for the
Secret – unpublished in French).

I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belong-

ing; I have an impulse or fear or terror in the face of a political

space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the

secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the

public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring

sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. [.. .] if a right to

the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.^50

The French presidential election campaign in 2002 came as a
complete upheaval for Derrida, mixing the public and private
spheres in a way over which he had absolutely no control. Of course,