Book review of Samir Haddad's 'Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy' (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), in Derrida Today, (v.8, (2), 2015), 238-244. (original) (raw)

In an interview first published in 1983 in Le Nouvel Observateur Jacques Derrida explained how he felt himself to be an heir of those thinkers who had gone before him: I feel that I am also an heir: faithful as far as possible, loving, avid to reread and to experience the philosophical joys that are not just the games of the esthete. I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech–one which has not yet been allowed to speak. All this, I realize, makes for a bizarre mixture of responsibility and disrespect. My attention to the present scene is at once intense, desperate, and a little distracted, as if anachronistic. But without this bizarreness, nothing seems to me desirable today. We have gotten more than we think we know from “tradition,” but the scene of the gift also obliges us to a kind of filial lack of piety, at once serious and not so serious, as regards the thinking to which we have the greatest debt. I would have liked to speak here about Kant, Schelling or Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, and then about Levinas or Blanchot,