Critical Intimacy: Jacques Derrida and the Friendship of Politics

Abstract

Since receiving the invitation to participate in this special issue, I have been wondering about whether I can do justice in this brief space to what I have learnt from reading Derrida. And as someone who long ago began to distrust those versions of the history of ideas organized around the names of important individuals, I've also wondered about how and why I would want to link lessons to the proper name “Jacques Derrida.” Indeed the pleasure, and even the reward, I have received from reading Derrida is hard for me to separate out from the experience of living as part of a community that exists within and across the institutions I inhabit, with colleagues, students and friends. I associate Derrida with a way of life, a way of reading, writing, speaking and listening to each other, that is part of the “simple day-to-dayness” and “the intense moments of work, teaching and thinking” that constitutes this community, that allies us. I hope I can communicate a little of what reading Derrida has meant, and still does mean, to me then within this particular institutional life.