1. This lecture, the last that Derrida would give in France, was published under the title “Le souverain bien—ou l’Europe en mal de souveraineté: La conférence de Strasbourg du 8 juin 2004” in the journal Cités, special issue Derrida politique—La déconstruction de la souveraineté (puissance et droit), no. 30 (2007): 103—40. The lecture is based almost entirely, with the exception of a long introduction, on the first session (of December 12, 2001) of Derrida’s seminar The Beast and Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1—31. The lecture was also published, without the long introduction of the Strasbourg conference, in the proceedings of the 2002 Cerisy conference, La démocratie à venir, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 433—56. It was also presented, with a different introduction, at a conference in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2003 (La souveraineté Critique, dé:construction, apories: Autour de la pensée de Jacques Derrida) and published, first separately in a bilingual edition, under the title Le souverain Bien/O soberano Bem, trans. Fernanda Bernardo (Viseu: Palimage Editores, 2004), and then in the proceedings of the conference Jacques Derrida à Coimbra/Derrida em Coimbra, ed. Fernando Bernardo (Viseu: Palimage Editores, 2005), 75—105.
2. “Le lieu dit: Strasbourg,” in Penser à Strasbourg (Galilée and Ville de Strasbourg, 2004), 31–59.
3. [Derrida playfully refers to himself, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as “the Three Musketeers” who founded the collection La philosophie en effet with Éditions Galilée. Following a suggestion by his friend Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida was reading the adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas during the last year of his life. In chapter 3, we see Derrida again making reference to the Dumas novel, suggesting that he, François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt were the four musketeers who founded the International College of Philosophy.—Trans.]
4. The four students were Perrine Marthelot, Nicolas Heitz, Benjamin Mamie, and Stanislas Jullien.
5. “Dialogue entre Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Rue Descartes, no. 52 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 86–99.
6. “Ouverture,” discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, in Rue Descartes, no. 45, Les 20 ans du Collège international de philosophie (2004): 26–55.
7. “Responsabilité—du sens à venir,” conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy, in Sens en tous sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 165–200.
1. [Derrida is obviously responding here to the title of the conference, “Penser à Strasbourg,” which means at once thinking of and thinking in Strasbourg. The French title of Derrida’s essay, “Le lieu dit: Strasbourg,” can be heard in several different ways. First, a lieu-dit is a place-name, a term used to designate a locality or small geographical area. When dit is taken as the past participle of dire, the phrase can mean “The place called or named Strasbourg,” and when dit is taken as the third person singular form of the present tense, with Strasbourg as its object, it means “the place speaks, names, or dictates Strasbourg.” The title can thus be heard as a translation of the epigraph that follows, “Der Ort sagt,” which comes from Hölderlin’s translation of Creon’s words in Sophocles’ Antigone. Derrida quotes these words, along with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s translation of them—“C’est le lieu qui me dicte”—at the beginning of “Ex abrupto,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 262–63. Kamuf translates the phrase as “It is the place that dictates to me.”—Trans.]
2. Penser l’Europe à ses frontières (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 1993).
3. [A TGV (train à grande vitesse) or high speed train was finally established between Paris and Strasbourg in 2007.—Trans.]
4. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 189.
5. [GREPH (Groupe de recherche sur l’enseignement philosophique), founded by Derrida and others in 1975, tried to protect the teaching of philosophy in the final year of high school and even extend its teaching to earlier grades. Derrida speaks at some length about GREPH in Chapter 3. See also the many references to GREPH in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Eyes of the University, Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). See the translator’s foreword to Eyes of the University for a succinct account of the origins of both GREPH and the International College of Philosophy.—Trans.]
1. [See section 74 of Being and Time.—Trans.]
2. [Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 69, “all graphemes are of a testamentary essence.”—Trans.]
3. [Jean-Luc Nancy is referring here to the comments Derrida made after each of the student presentations during the day of doctoral studies organized by the Department of Philosophy at the Marc Bloch University.—Trans.]
4. On the question of the animal, see Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), as well as the two volumes of Derrida’s final seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign, vols. 1 and 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 2011).
1. [In French a passeur is someone who ferries passengers across a river or brings them across borders.—Trans.]
2. [This is the report written in 1982 by François Châtelet, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt in anticipation of the founding of the College. It has been published as Le rapport bleu: Les sources historiques et théoriques du Collège international de philosophie (Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).—Trans.]
3. I am here reconstituting very poorly, from memory and very schematically, the argument I had developed during the anniversary session of the College.—J-LN.
4. [High school teachers are released from a certain percentage of their normal teaching load when teaching a course at the College.—Trans.]
5. [Jan Plug writes in his Introduction to Eyes of the University, x: “With the announcement of the Réforme Haby—named after then minister of national education, René Haby—which set out to curtail the teaching of philosophy in French secondary schools, the group’s work took on new urgency. GREPH fought not only to maintain philosophy in the lycée but to extend it, to have it begin before the final year, or Terminale, in which it had traditionally been taught.” Plug goes on to offer a clear account of the work of GREPH during the last 1970s, of the Estates General held on June 16 and 17, 1979, and then of the founding of the International College of Philosophy on October 10, 1983—Trans.]
6. [Jean-Pierre Chevènement was François Mitterrand’s minister of research and industry from 1981 to 1983 and then minister of national education from 1984 to 1986.—Trans.]
7. [Established in 1530, the Collège de France is a non—degree-granting institution of higher learning and research. It offers lectures that are free and open to the public on a variety of topics in both the sciences and the humanities. Originally created in 1941 and then refounded under its current name in 1975, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) is an institution for research and higher learning that offers master’s and doctoral degrees through its forty-seven research centers and thirteen doctoral programs.—Trans.]
1. [The title given to this discussion, “Responsabilité—du sens à venir,” can be heard in several different ways. It can be read as a title and subtitle—“Responsibility: Of the Sense to Come”—or as a single title meaning “Responsibility of” or “Responsibility for” “the sense to come.” There is also the intimation of “Responsibility—in the sense to come,” that is, responsibility in a sense that has not yet arrived or been understood.—Trans.]
2. [Nancy is referring to the children’s game “pass the slipper” (le furet).—Trans.]
3. [Other speakers at this two-day conference organized by Francis Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin around the work of Jean-Luc Nancy included Alexander García-Düttmann, Roberto Esposito, Werner Hamacher, and Catherine Malabou.—Trans.]
4. [Khâgne is the second year of preparatory classes in humanities for entrance to the École Normale Supérieure.—Trans.]
5. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Libbrett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 54–55.
6. Ibid., 183n50.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World; or, Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 70.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.. trans. modified.
10. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 152.