In March, an old Derrida nemesis, Jean-Pierre Faye, published a libelle, or a polemical pamphlet, titled Lettre sur Derrida: Combat au-dessus du vide, or Letter on Derrida: Combat Above the Void. It is a title that deliberately evokes Martin Heidegger’s famous “Letter on Humanism,” a text that has long been at the center of heated debates in France. The short book alleges that Derrida used back-door politicking to impose his own vision on the Collège international de philosophie (CIPh), a nontraditional philosophy school formed under President François Mitterrand's administration in 1983. Faye claims that Derrida wanted to force deconstruction on the collège, and in so doing make “the Nazi Heidegger” its “master thinker.”

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