Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The University at the

Frontiers of Europe1
Jacques Derrida

Messieurs 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 frontiers? At those virtual
fronts that are drawn by all frontiers? 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 façade of what is most sovereign, the head, oriented
locality, a surface of exposure but also of protection turned toward the
outside, il y a lieu de faire front, 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 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
116 Oxford Literary Review

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 through, everywhere and very close to
here, the torment of which you are aware and which surpasses no doubt
a 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 lesser but of a completely other
nature. How should the university decide, then, in complete freedom
and whether that freedom is sovereign or not, as to its own ‘politics’,
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
honor me today with their trust, I 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 theater.
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 analyze, 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
Jacques Derrida 117

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 décor,
I would insult the gravity of the present times, as well as those who,
not far from us, are suffering from them sometimes to point of death.
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
prosopopeia of the Laws that Socrates, in the Crito, here in Athens,
will have 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, and as in the theater, were playing a role, they were representing
what Rousseau will later call a ‘legitimate convention’; they advanced
behind a mask, prosopon, once again the face, the head, the forehead,
the front. Through a prosopopeia, 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 speak for 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.
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 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, come
118 Oxford Literary Review

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, unworthy
guest of the offered hospitality, I dare still to claim that everything,
almost everything of what 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 of what I would like to say to you, coming
to me from Athens, returns without delay to Athens — not only when
I will 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 prosopopeia lends speech,
the laws of the Polis, of the City or the State, nomoi tes¯ poleos
¯ . 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 resisted, becoming thus a modern dissident or an
ancestor of the ‘civic disobedience’2 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
Jacques Derrida 119

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, then the University. It is true that we
are no longer in the time of the Crito, and no one will ever dare to
present himself as Socrates, be it as the errant descendent or degenerate
grandson of Socrates, anymore 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¯ ekheis poiein? allo ti
e¯ toutoi¯ toi¯ ergoi¯ hoi¯ epikheireis dianoei
¯ 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 pronounced in it have no force but are nullified
and destroyed by private individuals?’3
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
FYROM, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo.4 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
120 Oxford Literary Review

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 Humanités,
the Humanities in English, or Geisteswissenschaften 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 to be sure not, 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 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 these 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 with 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 face of the 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
Jacques Derrida 121

between sovereign states (and it is about sovereignty that I would like to

speak to you).
Who are the belligerents in this war without 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’s 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-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
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 authochthony —
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
122 Oxford Literary Review

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 a 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 (B-92) which had been officially reduced to
silence by the Milošević 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 didn’t need military or diplomatic pseudo-experts to realise
that there were other and better things to do: for example, aiding the
Serbian opposition.
We are thus living an ana-chronic simultaneity, if I 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
Jacques Derrida 123

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,
I 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 name — for, alas, yesterday there
were other wars just as unnamable 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 respect more or less 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
moralism.
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, science, 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
124 Oxford Literary Review

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 deceptive 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
Jacques Derrida 125

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’affrontent] still today in a war without 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 take 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 nation-states 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
126 Oxford Literary Review

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), 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 deconstruction underway of sovereignism, of phantasms of political
theology and of state-nationalist 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 I 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
Jacques Derrida 127

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 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 inadequation 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’ve 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 cité ] 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).5 This concept
128 Oxford Literary Review

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 theologico-political 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, the absolute source of power and right.
When, at the beginning of The Social Contract, Rousseau, like Socrates
in the 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!6

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’ (374–75), 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 (352). Everything that proceeds from ‘the
will of the people or the sovereign will, which is general’ is ‘sacred
and for that very reason inviolable’ (400–01). 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,
Jacques Derrida 129

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’.7 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 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 refused 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 inter-
national 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 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 at bottom a freedom without power. But
without power does not mean ‘without force’. And there, discreetly,
130 Oxford Literary Review

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, economic-military 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 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 prosopopeias,
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 will have 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. I 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 I
have not let myself be intimidated by their prosopopeia, 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
familial 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.
Jacques Derrida 131

And who thanks you for the patience with which you have listened
to the Stranger speak to you for such long time in order to say nothing,
or almost nothing — that’s all.
Thank you, forgive me.
—Translated by Peggy Kamuf
Notes
1
Originally published as ‘Inconditionnalité et souveraineté: L’Université aux
frontières de l’Europe’, translated and annotated by Vanghélis Bitsouris (Athens,
Editions Patakis, 2002). The editors of OLR wish to thank Editions Patakis and
Marguerite Derrida for their gracious permission to translate this essay.
2
The Greek translation of Derrida’s text by Vanghélis Bitsoris, which is extensively
annotated, includes the following note here: ‘Derrida prefers to translate the English
term ‘civil disobedience’ by ‘désobéissance 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,
abject 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 désobéissance civique” in Droit de cité [Le moulin du Château, Editions
de l’Aube, 1998], 17). The English term was introduced into political philosophy
by the American writer Henry David Thoreau (see his essay “Resistance to Civil
Government” [1849]’ (‘Inconditionnalité ou souveraineté’, 106, 108n24) (Tr.)
3
Plato, 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).
4
The acronym FYROM stands for Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. (Tr.)
5
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.)
6
J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Du Contract social; ou, Principes du droit politique’ in Rousseau,
Oeuvres complètes, vol. III, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Editions Gallimard, 1964), 351; Derrida’s emphasis
(my translation).
7
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), 28.

DOI: 10.3366/E0305149809000467