Jacques Derrida
Unconditionality
or Sovereignty:
The University at the
Frontiers of Europe*
Abstract: In the midst of war at the heart of Europe and beyond,
can the university maintain its commitment to unconditionality (the
unconditional right to the truth, to ask any and every question) while
contending with and contesting the form and the force of sovereignty?
Can there be an unconditionality without sovereignty?
Keywords: university, unconditionality, sovereignty, democracy,
Europe, philosophy, war, NATO, Serbia, Kosovo
M
essieurs the Rector, the Vice-Rector, the President, dear colleagues,
dear friends, what is happening today in the world, and closer to us
in Europe?
What is coming to pass at those limits called frontier? At those virtual fronts
that are drawn by all frontier? Frons names what faces, at the highest part of
the head and the chef (kephale, caput) above the gaze, at the capital height
of what is capital, the capitol, capital itself. On the eminent face or facade
of what is most sovereign, the head, oriented locality, a surface of exposure
but also of protection turned toward the outside, ily a lieu de fairefront, as
one says in French, that is, there is place and reason to form a front, a united
front, to close ranks against the outside, or even against the outsider and
stranger. Above the eyes, the superiority, the height or haughtiness of the
*
Originally published as ‘Inconditionnalité et souveraineté: L’Université
aux frontières de l’Europe’, translated and annotated by Vanghélis
Bitsoris (Athens: Editions Patakis, 2002).
Jacques Derrida
| 13
frons, in Latin, not far from the Greek ophyrys, is also, in this figure of the
figure and the face, a territorial limit, the frontier of a self-styled sovereign
state when it means to defend itself by attacking on a battle line, at the moment of forming a united front against the invasion of the stranger or the
enemy. There is a correspondence between this virtual or actual war, this
bordering frontier, and all the figures of the front, but also all the political
metaphors of party: right or left, from the ‘national front’ to the ‘national liberation front’, from the ‘opposition front’ to the ‘popular front’ — and even
the ‘Islamic Salvation Front’.
What is becoming of the front, today? Can one prevent the frontier from
becoming a front? In the world, and closer to us, in Europe, in Southern
Europe, where fronts and frontiers are drawn? And then can one compare
the limits of the university to frontiers, external frontiers (relation with the
world, the state, civil society and fields of power) or internal frontiers (disciplines, hierarchies and fields of knowledge)? Does the university also aim to
be sovereign, with a sovereignty analogous to the one nation-states are presumed to have, a sovereignty that is today going, everywhere and very close
to here, through the torment of which you are aware and which surpasses no
doubt simple crisis? Unless the supposed independence of the university, the
immunity, the freedom, the absolute exemption that it claims are still more
demanding: neither superior nor inferior but of a completely different nature.
How should the university decide, then, in complete freedom and whether
that freedom is sovereign or not, as to its own ‘policies’, its own ‘ethics’ with
respect to all the powers, state powers, powers of the nation-state, powers
of the church, ideological powers, economic powers, powers of the media,
and so forth, wherever these powers fight over sovereignty or wage war with
each other on the subject of sovereignty?
Even as I express my profound gratitude to Pantion University, to my Athenian colleagues, to so many very dear friends, to all those who honour me
today with their trust, 1 must forego here any facileness.
This would not be the moment, less than ever.
The time is less auspicious than ever, you will agree, for the effects of a certain academic theatre.
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In these times of war, of a European war, even of a world war that no longer
dares to declare itself as such and in that name, through an indescribable ordeal
that is difficult to analyse, where it is often impossible to choose one’s camp,
take sides, and choose one’s party, when we no longer even recognise our old
concepts and our old imagery of party or camp, of front and frontier, of war,
precisely, of the rights of war and the jus gentium [droit des gens], or even
of war crime, at a time when our concepts of the political, the state and the
nation, of international law as well are continually shaken by an earthquake,
would it not be indecent to give in to conventional words, to the rhetoric of
the occasion, to predictable rituals of a Doctorate honoris causa? To treat this
Doctorate honoris causa as the formality of a ceremony full of pomp, the
conservatory of a piously inherited tradition, a timeless survival from bygone
times, would be first of all to endorse an ingratitude toward my Greek friends
and toward the university that welcomes me. It would also be proof of some
lack of seriousness – or of philosophical insensitivity. It would be to forget
the mission and the very concept of this place that is still called the university (which I distinguish here from every other research institute oriented to
techno-economic applications and dependent on external powers). If I treated
this Doctorate as an honorary decoration or decor, I would insult the gravity
of the present times, as well as those who, not far from us, are suffering from
them sometimes to the point of dying. It would be to fail in the responsibilities
that are ours, I believe, today, in Europe. And well beyond Europe.
These responsibilities weigh on us, whether or not we assume them. They
insist, they come back to remind us here, for example, of that prosopopoeia
of the Laws that Socrates, in Crito, here in Athens, made speak. He lent them
his voice, as you know, but so as to pretend they were addressing him. As
always, the laws of the city, like in the theatre, played a role, they represented
what Rousseau will later call a ‘legitimate convention’; they advanced behind a mask, prosopon, the face, the head, the forehead, the front. Through a
prosopopoeia, the laws nevertheless dictate our responsibilities, they speak
to us, they speak before us within us, they speak to us, in us before us. Addressing us, but through us, they speak to us, they speak us, they speaker us,
in our direction and in our place, they also tell us who we are or should be,
they say us, they express us and define us with their injunction even before
any response on our part. To flee them is thus impossible. To deny them, turn
away or protect ourselves from them, as we seek to do so often, let us admit
(because they are incommensurable with ourselves), would be another way
of recognising that inheritance inscribed in advance in our language, our
languages, in the languages that are older than we are and without which we
would not even begin to think.
Jacques Derrida
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In the affiliation of these languages, yours is not just one idiom among
other European idioms, among other philosophical languages, among the
languages in which something like Europe, and philosophy, and politics,
declared themselves to themselves in their name. In their name but also in
the name, already, of that Athenian political philosophy of hospitality, of
that philoxenia which commanded one to receive the stranger, the xenos,
and treat him as a friend, an ally, a philos. It is thus that I receive the chance
to be received by you today, as a guest and friend. The old and noble European practice of Doctorates honoris causa, always awarded to those who
are foreign to the welcoming university, and often foreigners in the country,
who come from the other side of a frontier, this practice keeps the memory, I
believe, like philosophy itself, of a philia or a philoxenia that remains above
all a political hospitality, and an ethics in the experience of the foreigner,
or even of the refugee or the exile: an ethics and a politics of the frontier,
in sum.
That is why, ashamed of not addressing you in Greek, an unworthy guest of
the offered hospitality, I dare still to claim that everything, almost everything
that I am preparing to say to you will be dictated, directly or not, in Greek
and from out of a Greek memory. In advance translated from Greek, what I
am preparing to say to you is thus right away retranslated back into Greek. (I
am all the more grateful to the interpreter who at this moment watches over
this invisible translation.) Everything, almost everything that I would like to
say to you, coming to me from Athens, returns without delay to Athens —
not only when I name the law, right, politics, the state and democracy. For
I do not forget that I am speaking here in a university of political and social
sciences. Everything, almost everything, seems to proceed from this Athenian genealogy.
But where would the difference be here between everything and almost everything? How to take account of this almost everything, in sum? Perhaps
this almost nothing has to do, according to a barely audible although decisive
difference, with a discordance in the voice itself of the Laws that interpellate
Socrates. As if another voice were parasiting the nomoi to which the Socratic
prosopopoeia lends speech, the laws of the Polis, of the City or the State,
nomoi tespoleos. These laws already prefigure, perhaps, the modern law of
the sovereign state, and the discordant note that I would like to make heard
today may be coming from a place foreign to this sovereign authority. But
this foreign place may still lead back toward a certain Socrates, to the place
from which he made the laws speak, but also toward a site from which this
master of irony and the endless question might have disobeyed, and fled, and
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resisted, becoming thus a modern dissident or an ancestor of ‘civic disobedience’1 by which one contests the positive legality of a nation-state in the
name of a more urgent or imperative justice.
The immense inheritance of these responsibilities is inscribed, of course,
in what we confusedly call the philosophy of our culture, more rigorously
in all that for which the European university is at once the archive and the
law – as if, so as to incorporate their memory, the tables, the tablets, and
even today the computer screens continued to resemble certain tables of
the law, the body, the archives and the supports of constitutions, of legislations that watch over the invention of the Academy, the Lyceum, and the
University. It is true that we are no longer in the time of Crito, and no one
will ever dare to present himself as Socrates, be it as the errant descendent
or degenerate grandson of Socrates, any more then he would as a prisoner
condemned to death for having corrupted young citizens. And above all,
above all, what I am preparing to suggest, so as to submit it for your discussion, will be less docile than Socrates was to those Laws that call him
back to the sovereignty of the polis. ‘What are you proposing to do?’ they
say to Socrates. ‘Can you deny that by this act which you are contemplating you intend, so far as you have the power, to destroy us, the laws, and
the whole state as well?’ (Allow me to read the preceding sentences in ancient Greek: ‘‘ Eipe moi, o Sokrates, ti en noi ekheispoieinialio ti e toutoi
toi ergot hoi epikheireis diandei tous te nomous hemas apolesai kai sympasan ten polin to son meros). ‘Do you imagine that a city can continue
to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are
1
The Greek translation of Derrida’s text by Vanghelis Bitsoris,
which is extensively annotated, includes the following note here:
‘Derrida prefers to translate the English term ‘civil disobedience’
by ‘desobeissance civique’, ‘civic disobedience’, which seems to
accord with Etienne Balbar’s interpretation: ‘Civic and not civil
disobedience – as one might be led to think by a hasty transcription
of the corresponding English expression: civil disobedience. It is not
just a matter of individuals who, in conscience, object to authority,
but of citizens who, in a grave circumstance, recreate their citizenship
through a public display of disobedience to the state; (Etienne Balibar,
‘Sur la desobeissance civique’ in Droit de cite’ [Le moulin du Chateau,
Editions de I’Aube, 1998], p. 17). The English term was introduced into
political philosophy by the American writer Henry David Thoreau (see
his essay ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ [1849]’ (‘Inconditionnalite’
ou souverainete, 106, 108n24) (Tr.)
Jacques Derrida
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pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private
individuals?’2
These obsessive responsibilities weigh on us in a more urgent, more pressing
fashion (exactly like what presses at the frontier, against the frontier, presses
on the concept of the frontier) and in exemplary fashion at the frontiers of
Greece and of Europe, so close to the FYROM3, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo.
These responsibilities are not limited by European or Greek citizenship. But
if they are universal, in what ways are they also of the university today, in
a specific and imperative manner? In what way are they ours, in the university? And in philosophy, this discipline generally assumed as such in what is
called, by that ancient word laden with history, the ‘Humanities’? To what
was preserved beneath this old word, the ‘Humanities’, perhaps it is our duty
today to give new tasks, through new interpretations, discussions, mises en
oeuvre, new claims for what are called human rights, and thus through the
earthquakes of this century, the seisms at the frontier that displace even the
definition of the front and the frontier, the wars without war, the new concept
of crime against humanity and the new rights, the original institutions to
which they give rise? For we see from now on the old ontological question
‘what is man?’, ‘what makes for the humanity of man?’, ‘what is proper to
man?’ put back into play in the relatively modern concepts of ‘rights’ called
human rights or rights of man, and in the even more recent juridical concept
of ‘crime against humanity’ (1945). Having become brand new again, the
question of man ought to lend an unknown urgency, even a sense of the
unprecedented, to what are called in French les Humanites, the Humanities in English, or Geisteswissenscbafien in German. The question of man
is violently awakened from a dogmatic slumber by the war without war and
without front, just as much as by the life sciences or sciences of the animal,
and by the technosciences that make ever more uncertain what we call man’s
proper nature.
The idea of the university is not, to be sure, in its strict sense, an idea from
fifth-century Greece; it is not born at the origin of philosophy but I will say
later on how it nevertheless comes from there. The idea of the university, in
2Plato, Crito, translated by Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected
Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton:
Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1961), 35 (50 a-b).
3
The acronym FYROM stands for Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia. (Tr.)
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its medieval or in its modern form (more or less inherited from the German
and Berlin model of the nineteenth century), is a European invention, however enigmatic may be or may have become once again the words ‘university’ and ‘Europe’. If today there are universities throughout the world, they
are most often instituted on the model of the modern European university.
This confirms a certain homogeneity – both troubling and troubled – between globalisation /mondialisation/ and Europeanisation, or what the doxa
believes it understands by these words.
If there is a question that I wish to ask here, in the time allotted and within
the limits of such a lecture, it will not be inspired only by reason, and asked
by reason of our common belonging to Europe, to the old Europe or to the
Europe that is seeking itself. For then, even if that were a good reason, it
would not be a sufficient reason. How to interpret, beyond even our European citizenship, our universal responsibility as members of the university in
war time? Not in the face of war or above the fray, as one says, but at once at
the edge of a war very nearby, even at the heart of a fray that everyone will
recognise under the name of Kosovo, in a storm that nevertheless no longer
answers to the concept and to the name, thus to the traditional fronts of war,
its fronts of life and death, its fronts of slaughter, as well as its conceptual
fronts, as these have been defined until now by European law? For we are
dealing here with a war without war, with a war without declaration of war
between sovereign states (and it is about sovereignty that I would like to
speak to you).
Who are the belligerents in this war without a name? The politico-military
alliance of what are referred to as North Atlantic nation-states, an alliance
constituted during the Cold War, affirms loudly and strongly that it does not
wish to put anyone’s life in danger, whether on its side or the other side,
whether civilian or military – a distinction that has today become obsolete
and as problematic as the old distinction between the stasis of a civil war
and the polemos of a war between states. Without declaring war, the aforementioned alliance of sovereign states announces that it ‘shall not kill’ at the
moment it unleashes the most powerful and most deadly high-tech weapons, missiles said to be smart and sophisticated (what would the masters of
the sophon say about the use of this word today?), which are also the most
blind and most barbaric weapons; meanwhile on the other side, Serbia – a
European state that, unlike France and Greece, for example, does not belong
to the European Union or to NATO – in the name of its sovereign authority
over a province that in the past it arbitrarily deprived of its autonomy, dares
to perpetrate massive acts of violence aimed at cleansing its own nation-
Jacques Derrida
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state of any supposed heterogeneity, be it ethnic or religious. Let us never
forget that this violence and these violations, these rapes, correspond, on all
sides of what is not even any longer a front, to undeclared interests but also
to passions that are indissociably national, ethnic, racial and religious and
whose form is all the more archaic in that at stake there is a phantasmatics of
roots and territorial possessions that our modernity teaches us to dissociate
from politics, from political reason. For the political no longer has a place,
so to speak, it no longer has a stable and essential topos. It is without a territory, uprooted by technology, by the unheard-of acceleration and extension
of telecommunicational distances, by irresistible processes of delocalisation.
Here is a topic for meditation on our Athenian inheritance but that also goes
beyond it: the political today is no longer circumscribed by the stability that
ties the state to the earth, to the territory, to the terrain, to the terrestrial frontier, or to autochthony – or even to that burial place that a certain Oedipus
already sought to hide from Antigone and Ismene.
Moreover, and I recall this in passing, the conflicts underway provoke not
only the suffering, the wounds, the dead of classical wars, not only the exoduses and displacements of populations that belong to wars of this century.
They are also unfolding worldwide on those new virtual fronts that are, on
the two or the three sides, the media, television, email, the Internet. The
quasi world war is also the war on the World Wide Web being fought at once
by the powers of nation-states or coalitions of hegemonic nation-states, by
corporations of supranational capital (capable, on the two or three sides, of
all possible manipulations) and by citizens or non-citizens of every country,
resisters, opponents, dissidents, who can in this way, thanks to these same
technical powers of email and the Internet, free themselves of the powers of
the state or of capital, and liberate a certain democratic, cosmopolitan affirmation or even an affirmation that goes beyond citizenship altogether. Thus,
for example, a few weeks ago, right in the middle of the war, university academics and intellectuals around the world were able to defy state-controlled
machines on the Internet in order to celebrate the anniversary of that free
radio of the Serbian democratic opposition (B92), which had been officially
reduced to silence by the Milosevic government, just as it is silenced from
now on, and still more gravely and in a no less perverse manner, by NATO
bombers. For if one really wanted to put an end to a Serbian political regime,
there were certainly, and have been for a long time, better things to do than
to strike Belgrade from so high and so far, and so cruelly. One did not need
military or diplomatic pseudo-experts to realise that there were other and
better things to do: for example, to aid the Serbian opposition.
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We are thus living an anachronic simultaneity, if 1 can say that, the dislocated contretemps of models that belong to heterogeneous configurations of
human history: the powers and the capital of the most sophisticated teletechnoscience cohabit with, and often put themselves at the service of, the archaic passions of the political animal. For example, with the phantasm of a
racial or ethnic, cultural or linguistic purity that cannot stand up to scrutiny
even for a moment.
Although it would be necessary to do so, I will not give in here to a pathetic
or polemical description of the suffering inflicted on all sides of what is not
even any longer a frontier or a front: suffering of which we have atrocious
images, suffering that often remains invisible to us, suffering inflicted on
individuals or peoples and that, absolute like the singularity of evil, wound
and death, will always remain as
unspeakable as it is unjustifiable. Although it would be necessary to do so, I
will also not give in to an analysis of the arguments deployed by the rhetoric
of the opposing parties. The historical and juridico-political arsenal of the
good reasons and good consciences would keep us here for hours while we
supported all the causes, in the infernal triangle of NATO, Serbia and the independence movement in Kosovo. On the other hand, and in however a summary fashion as may be, 1 would like to submit for your reflection a single
question or even a hypothesis concerning the place, the significance, dare I
say the mission of the university, and within it the task of philosophy and of
the new Humanities in this war without a name — for, alas, yesterday there
were other wars just as unnameable and ethnic cleansings of the same type
to which Europe and its American guardian paid little attention. There are as
well, not far from Europe and around the Mediterranean basin, very close to
here, so many peoples oppressed and repressed by more or less legitimate
state powers, which more or less respect UN decisions, and which preoccupy
Europe and its guardian so little, or so badly, all of which ought to suffice to
trouble good conscience and morality.
My question and my hypothesis concern once again the front and the frontier, the becoming-front of the frontier, but this time, in a more discreet, fragile and also difficult fashion, on the line of a frontier between two concepts
that it is often difficult to dissociate: unconditionality and sovereignty. These
are two related but heterogeneous representations of what is called freedom.
The modern and European idea of the university presumes, in its principle,
the unconditional right to truth; better still, the unconditional right to ask any
question necessary on the subject of the history and value itself of truth, sci-
Jacques Derrida
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ence, or even humanity. There is not, in principle, any limit, in the university,
to the critical – or, I prefer to say, deconstructive – examination of every
presupposition, every norm, every axiomatics, and thus of every political
philosophy, every ideology, every religious or national dogmatics, as well
as all economic, social, national and religious powers that are in this manner, in one way or another, being supported, represented, serviced. And serviced, indispensably today, in the new public space, by that other capitalist,
ideological, economic power that is called the media, a heterogeneous and
contradictory instrument, to be sure, but the virtual stakes of every front. The
university has even the right to examine without presupposition the idea of
man or the human, its history and transformations, everywhere that this idea
conditions humanism, human rights, the notion of crime against humanity.
Not in order to threaten or destroy everything that is instituted there in this
way, but to expose it to the demands of a thought that, moreover, cannot be
reduced either to a discipline (anthropology, law, history and so forth), nor
even to philosophy and science, nor even to critique. And precisely what
I am calling in this way thought is what corresponds to this unconditional
demand. Thought is nothing other, it seems to me, than this experience of
unconditionality, it is nothing without the affirmation of this demand: to pose
questions about everything, including the value of the question, as well as the
value of truth and the truth of being that opens philosophy and science. The
limitless affirmation of this unconditional right to a thinking freed from any
power, and justified in saying what it thinks publicly (this was the definition
of Enlightenment according to Kant), is a figure of democracy, no doubt, of
democracy always to come, over and beyond what links democracy to the
sovereignty of the nation-state and of citizenship. Democracy to come, for, as
we know too well, no more than what we call democracies, universities, today, are not in fact granted this right of principle that nevertheless convokes
and institutes them. This democratic franchise, this unconditional freedom
supposes but is not reducible to what is called academic freedom (a restricted
and intra-university notion) or even to the freedom of opinion, speech and
expression that can be guaranteed by state constitutions.
Why insist so much, here and now, on an unconditional freedom of the university that should allow one to put in question the principle of any power –
first of all in order to think it with full independence and to the point of resistance, disobedience or dissidence? Because no one will have failed to notice
that this freedom can resemble and sometimes seem to be linked to what one
rightly calls sovereignty, for example, the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of a monarch, the sovereignty of a nation-state, the sovereignty of the
people itself. The link of this resemblance is a troubling, seductive but de-
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ceptive analogy. I would like to contest it today, in the singular moment that
we are living through, not only in view of refining a conceptual analysis, a
genealogical deconstruction or a speculative critique (which will be necessary at all times and at another rhythm) but to affirm here that it is in the
university, in any case in what it represents, that today one can and must,
thanks to this unconditional freedom, put in question the principle of sovereignty, or think the historical putting in question, presently underway, of the
principle of sovereignty, of this phantasm also of sovereignty that inspires
the politics of all state-nationalisms. These are clashing /s’affronteni/ still
today in a war without a name on fronts that are at once symbolic, virtual and
real but in any case deadly. For if, like many others over these last months, I
have felt constrained to keep silent, if I have not been able to choose sides or
rake a position, if I have merely pitied the victims (Kosovars and Serbs),
feeling allied only with opponents, dissidents and resisters, without ever approving the policies, whether they be those of the Serbian state, of course, or
of NATO, or even the policy that, in a militarily organised fashion, supports
the claim for a nation-state of Kosovo on the model of all the other nationstates that are called sovereign, it is indeed because on the three sides – and
I repeat, the three sides – one is acting in the name and on the orders of this
archaic phantasm-principle of sovereignty. There is nothing surprising in the
fact that this phantasm-principle, of theological origin, is indissociable both
from an ideology at once ethnicist, nationalist and state-nationalist (in its
more or less modern guise) and from some religious ferment whose gregarious logic and compulsive energy one recognises in the present conflicts: religion, ethnicity and the nation-state are welded together in the same sovereignist discourse. This would be too easy to demonstrate on the Serbian and
Kosovar sides, since this sovereignism is explicit on both sides: on the side
of those who, in Serbia, maintain that Kosovo is a part or should be a part of
Greater Serbia and that any aggression violates the sovereignty, memory and
identity of the Serbian state; and on the other side, where the armed aspiration to independence obeys a strategy of Kosovar sovereignty and aims to
constitute a so-called independent nation-state – which, as we already know,
would not see the light of day except under another disguised protectorate.
But facing them, on the side of NATO, precisely where one claims to be acting in the name of humanitarian and human rights principles that are superior to the sovereignty of states, precisely where one grants oneself the right
of intervention in the name of human rights, where one judges or intends to
judge the authors of war crimes or crimes against humanity, it would be easy
to show that this humanitarianism, which cares little about so many other
examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’ going on in the world, still remains, and brutally so, in the service of state interests of all kinds (economic or strategic),
Jacques Derrida
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whether they are interests shared by the NATO allies, or even in dispute between them (for example between the United States and Europe). I cannot
demonstrate this here, but it is in the university or in the spirit of completely
independent academic research that this possible and necessary analysis can
be attempted and patiently debated, with an inflexible rigor. It is only in a
place of unlimited questioning and affirmation that one can respond to a
double exigency. On the one hand, it is necessary to pursue coherently the
critical and genealogical analysis, I would prefer to say the deconstruct on
underway of sovereignism, of phantasms of political theology and of statenationalist ideology that, always welded together, command more or less
lucidly both the terrible Serbian repression, with its project of ethnic cleansing, and on the other side, which is not that of the Kosovar victims who suffer from all of this just as the Serbian victims do, but of the state-nationalist
aims of Kosovo which claims to reconstitute, more or less lucidly, one of
these sovereign nation-states, one of these ethnico-religious entities of homo-hegemonic inclination at the moment when the aforesaid sovereignty
appears to be a more and more archaic model. The critical task is complex,
as is its strategy. Let us never overlook this complexity, and once again, it is
in the university that we can see to this with the patience and prudence required. Patience and prudence because the ideology of sovereignty can have,
here or there, provisionally, welcome effects of emancipation. Next, let us
never forget this massive and grave fact: the producers, orators, or even propagandists of this state-nationalist ideology often associated with churches
and ethnicity, but always religious in itself and in essence, are also most often writers, publicists, intellectuals and academics. But on the other hand,
the same exigency has to urge one to uncover, on the side of NATO, an almost symmetrical ambition, and 1 do say almost symmetrical. Behind a discourse of human rights that claims (sometimes sincerely in the case of certain spokespersons and certain citizens) to raise the moral and humanitarian
concern above state-nationalist interests and thus above sovereignty, the
NATO allies pursue a contradictory policy that, more or less lucidly, always
relies on pseudo-experts of all sorts, the ones more arrogant and more fallible than the others (I am not thinking only of military experts). NATO’s
stratagems also serve the hegemonic interests, powers and aims of allied or
competing nation-states, between the United States and Europe. I say ‘almost symmetrical’ because the relation of economic and military forces is,
in the long run, too unequal; but also because, even where it serves as an
imperfect alibi, the discourse of human rights maintains a future that nationalism and sovereignism have already lost. At least as fundamental concepts
of the political. When a no-doubt well-intentioned NATO General Secretary,
Javier Solana, declares, as he did on April 25, 1999: ‘We are moving into a
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system of international relations in which human rights, rights to minorities
every day are much more important, and more important even than sovereignty’, he is announcing a future toward which in fact ‘we are moving’. But
in the interval of this progress, the inadéquation persists. It will always persist. It is inscribed within this discourse of human rights and minorities. That
is why we must deconstruct ad infinitum but also denounce the machinations, ruses, lies through which this respectable discourse of human rights
accommodates, in an unjust and selective fashion, the hegemonic aims of
state-nationalist superpowers. These superpowers do not renounce their own
sovereignty. As soon as it seems opportune for them, they do not even respect any longer the organisations of international law that they institute and
continue to dominate. Moreover, the United States and the NATO countries
are not the only ones that pay little attention to the UN when it seems useful
to them to do so, any more than it is the case that Serbia is the only country
that practices ‘ethnic cleansing’. This so-called cleansing, as I have said, is
going on not far from here, as you well know, following other paths and
other rhythms.
What, then, allows one to distinguish between, on the one hand, the freedom
of thought that is in principle unconditional, which seeks its best example
and its established right [droit de cite] in the university and, on the other
hand, sovereignty, notably state-nationalist sovereignty? It is ultimately a
theologico-political history of power. I cannot deploy here the argumentation
but it would make apparent first of all the theological origins of the concept
of sovereignty (‘sovereign’, ‘superanus’, from ‘superans’, designates first of
all the almightiness, predominance and superiority of God, of the Lord God,
then of the absolute monarch by divine right).4 This concept of sovereignty
remains marked by a religious and sacred heritage even when it is transferred
to the people. Rousseau’s Social Contract marks an important moment in
this mutation, a fracture that in my opinion has not shaken the theologicopoliticaJ solidity of the semantics of sovereignty. Divine or monarchic sovereignty was transferred onto the people in a supposedly secularised, free and
self-determining republic or democracy. The people become the sovereign,
which is one, inviolable and indivisible, absolute source of power and right.
When, at the beginning of The Social Contract, Rousseau, like Socrates in
4
For Derrida’s most thorough probing of the theological origins of
sovereignty, see The Beast and the Sovereign, I (2001-2002), translated
by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
(Tr.)
Jacques Derrida
| 25
Crito, causes the voice of the law to resound in his voice, the law of his own
country, he writes:
Born the citizen of a free state, and member of the sovereign, the right of voting there suffices to impose on me the duty to inform myself concerning these
affairs, whatever faint influence my voice might have in public affairs. I am
fortunate, each time I meditate on governments, always to find new reasons in
my research to love the government of my country!5
He then legitimises this apparently secularising and humanising conversion
of the concept of sovereignty. It is thus one of those concepts of the political which Carl Schmitt reminds us are secularised theological inheritances.
To be a free citizen, to have the right to vote, to have a voice, as one says,
a political voice, is to be a member of and participate in the sovereign body
(‘Born the citizen of a free state, and member of the sovereign’, says Rousseau). The individual contracts with himself and is bound under a double relation: as member of the sovereign and toward the sovereign. Through what
Rousseau calls a ‘legitimate convention’,6 thus a kind of legal fiction, the
social order is founded as sacred and sacramental space: “the social order
is a sacred right’, says Rousseau.7 Everything that proceeds from ‘the will
of the people or the sovereign will, which is general’ is ‘sacred and for that
very reason inviolable’.8 If one takes account of this apparent secularisation
and this democratisation that transfers divine or monarchic sovereignty to
the self-determining people, then Marx is no doubt right, in his Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to distinguish two concepts of sovereignty, that
of the monarch and that of the people. ‘Sovereignty of the monarch or sovereignty of the people, that is the question’.9 He is also right to say that we
have here two concepts of sovereignty, distinguished as divine sovereignty
or human sovereignty. But despite this justified differentiation, I persist in
believing that the theological affiliation of sovereignty remains even where
5
6
7
8
9
J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Du Contract social; ou, Principes du droit polirique’ in
Rousseau, Quvrescompletes, vol. Ill, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and
Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Editions Gailimard,
1964), p. 351; Derrida’s emphasis (my translation).
ibid., pp. 374-75.
ibid., p. 352.
ibid., pp. 400-01.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, edited by
Joseph O’Malley, translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 28.
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one speaks of freedom and popular self-determination. In this volcanic forge,
in this burning hearth (the familial and theologico-political hearth of affiliation), are forged or fomented today all bellicose state-nationalisms, where
the ethnico-religious passion is obscurely welded to the claim of sovereignty,
of self-determined power, by means of all sorts of supposed cleansings. Always through fire and through blood. Moreover, the division and sharing
of sovereignty was recommended in this century by the International Peace
Conferences at The Hague, in 1899 and 1907, then by the League of Nations,
then by the Charter of the United Nations – and recently with the project of
the International Criminal Court (still rejected by the United States, it was
signed by France only reluctantly and with dilatory precaution). Far from
seeing there a threat to law, we can understand that all these institutions have
signified that the limitation of sovereignty was a condition of peace – and
even of law in general. It is true that divided or shared sovereignty remains
a sovereignty, and this is the ambiguity of the whole juridico-political discourse that still regulates inter­national institutions and the so very equivocal, doubtful, criticisable relations between the more powerful states and the
international institutions that are as indispensable as they are imperfect or
perfectible.
As for these decisive but difficult questions, one can work on them in a calm
and radical fashion, one can think them only in what the university symbolises today. The unconditionality of thought, the thought that ought to find
its place or its example in the university, may be identified wherever, in the
name of freedom itself, it can put in question the principle of sovereignty,
as a principle of power. Let us not pretend that this question is anything but
formidable and abyssal. For thought, thereby, the one that finds its place of
freedom there, also finds itself, to be sure, without power. It is an unconditionality without sovereignty, which is to say a freedom without power. But
without power does not mean ‘without force’. And there, discreetly furtively, another frontier is perhaps passed through, at once inscribing itself and
resisting the passage, the barely visible frontier between the unconditionality
of thought (that I hold to be the universal vocation of the university and of
the ‘Humanities’ to come) and the sovereignty of power, of all powers, theologico-political power down to its national or democratic guises, economicmilitary power, the power of the media, and so forth. The affirmation I am
speaking of remains a principle of resistance or of dissidence: without power
but without weakness. Without power but not without force, be it a certain
force of weakness. Far from retiring behind the certain frontiers of a field, a
camp, an inoffensive campus protected by invisible authorities, this thought
of the university must prepare, with all its force, a new strategy and a new
Jacques Derrida
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politics, a new thinking of the political. And of political responsibility. For
that, it must ally itself, in the world, in Europe and outside Europe, with all
the forces that do not conflate the critique of sovereignty with servitude, not
even with voluntary servitude, quite the contrary.
This is what I would have begun to answer, almost nothing, in sum, in an
awkward and hazarded manner, in an insolent manner as well to the laws
of the city {hoi nomoi kai to koinon tes poleos). This is what I would have
replied, almost nothing, in sum, and that’s all to the prosopopoeias, to the
authorised voices that Socrates, in advance of Rousseau, intends to make
speak, hears and makes speak, understands how to make speak. Have I invented other logoi than those of which Plato has left us a recording? Perhaps.
But I wager – this is an act of faith in Socrates the Athenian – that he heard
them, these almost mute voices, these voices I am inventing. 1 want to believe that he heard them even if he preferred, as a good citizen, not to let on
that he did. As for me, like any other, and modestly, I remain a citizen, citizen
of my country or of the world, to be sure, but I will never accept to speak,
write or teach only as a citizen. And certainly not in the university. That is
why I have had the impertinence to defy before you the laws of the city. But
if 1 have not let myself be intimidated by their prosopopoeia, it was in order
to let others speak, living or dead, and other laws. To prefer another law to
the law of the city: this tragedy is a familiar obsession for us. Too familiar
even. Greek memory will have illustrated our inheritance with several sublime and terrifying examples of it.
I do not dare to compare these examples to the risk I am taking in Athens,
here, today, ingenuously, as a grateful guest and friend, who thanks you for
the patience with which you have listened to the Stranger speak to you for
such a long time in order to say nothing, or almost nothing – that is all.
Thank you, forgive me.
(Translated from French by Peggy Kamuf)
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Jacques Derrida was professor of philosophy at the École Normale, and
director of the “Philosophical Institutions” at the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Professor Derrida was one of the founders of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris. He was Visiting
Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of
California at Irvine, USA. He is prominent author of a number of the books:
Séminaire, La bête et le souverain : Volume II, Editions Galilée, Paris, 2010;
L’animal que donc je suis, Paris: Galilée, 2006; Voyous, Galilée, Paris, 2003;
Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Galilée, Paris, 2000; Politiques de l’amitié,
Galilée, Paris,1994; Force de loi, Galilée, Paris, 1994; Spectres de Marx,
Galilée, Paris, 1993; L’autre cap, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1991; Du droit
à la philosophie, Galilée, Paris, 1990; La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud
et au-dela, Flammarion, Paris,1980; La Dissemination, Seuil, Paris, 1972;
Marges de la philosophie, Minuit, Paris, 1972; L’Ecriture et la différence,
Seuil, Paris, 1967; De la grammatologie, Editions de Minuit, Paris,1967; La
Voix et le phénomène, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris,1967.
Jacques Derrida
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