The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I regret that I must ask you once again to publish a response from me, this time to the letter of Mr. Sheehan. The text of this letter follows.

I would have preferred not to take up any more space in this column nor any more of the reader’s time with what could more correctly be dubbed the “Wolin/Sheehan affair.” However, the letter from Mr. Sheehan [NYR, February 11] compels me to recall a few stubborn and massive facts and then to pose several questions. The most incredible thing in this “affair,” let us note, is that now Mr. Sheehan seems to be demanding that I respond and justify myself in circumstances where it would be more appropriate and in better faith to demand it of Mr. Wolin. Isn’t he the one who translated (very badly) then published a text of mine without requesting my authorization and without even informing me of it, not even after the book was published?

1. Mr. Sheehan claims to have a complete file on the matter (“I have documentation for everything,” he says). He declares that he called or wrote to everyone (to Columbia University Press and even to France, to Le Nouvel Observateur). Why then did he never contact me during the six months that, so it seems, it took him to prepare his article? Is what I know or think about the non-authorized publication of my text or is what I can attest to in this regard so unimportant in his view? Strange, “embarrassing,” isn’t it? Anyone can see that Mr. Sheehan’s behavior resembles Mr. Wolin’s. The latter had also informed everyone but me. He informed everyone (his publisher and Le Nouvel Observateur) of his intention to publish my text in translation: he then did in fact publish it without my agreement and without my knowledge, thereby carefully avoiding talking to me about it at any time (that is, for months and months), leaving me to discover the thing after the fact. Strange, “embarrassing,” isn’t it? For whom? Why these oversights, why this avoidance on the part of Mr. Wolin as well as Mr. Sheehan? I will do no more than pose the question, but the hypotheses are not “hard to divine,” to take up the expression with which Mr. Sheehan, at least twice, disguises his insinuations. No harder to divine, moreover, than the reasons for which Mr. Wolin had from the first absolutely insisted on publishing a long text of mine, even if he had to do so without my knowledge. After all, he could have easily quoted my text, analyzed long excerpts from it, referred to it, and so on, without any authorization. No, he wanted at all costs for me to figure as one of the co-authors of his book. So why? Is it “hard to divine”? And then the withdrawal of my text from the second edition becomes, in Mr. Sheehan’s view, the most notable thing about this book. For, when he comes to talk about the book, he makes almost everything he has to say turn around this incident, neglecting, in his promotional haste, to explain how my “position” is, as he nevertheless recognizes in one line, “more complex” than Mr. Wolin thinks. Why? Is it “hard to divine”?

2. I maintain that Le Nouvel Observateur does not have the right to authorize without my accord the republication of my text in translation. Any competent lawyer will confirm this to be the case. No contract was ever signed between this magazine and myself on the subject of a text of which I remain the sole legal owner. Mme. Valentini acknowledged in a letter to Mr. Wollin (December 11, 1991) that she had “forgotten,” as had Mr. Wolin, to ask me for authorization (this “was forgotten,” she says calmly, “by you and by us”). If Mme. Valentini has recently claimed the contrary (over the telephone and in English, as Mr. Sheehan reports), she is mistaken or is misleading her questioner. If I have not taken legal action against Le Nouvel Observateur (“why doesn’t he take it up with the French journal?” asks Mr. Sheehan), just as I have never taken any legal action (I reiterate and insist on this point) against Mr. Wolin, it is because I do not like to assert my rights in this way when I can avoid it. This ridiculous affair has already made me lose too much time, and I was thinking especially of the future. Given that this wrong was irreversible, since the book was already published, I thought, let’s make sure at least that it is not repeated, and worry only about the next printing or edition. If there had been no wrong, by the way, would Mr. Wolin have offered his apology (“I apologize,” letter dated June 11, 1991, that is, long after his book was published and, in particular, after I had become indignant about it)? Even supposing, concesso non dato, that my legal agreement were not necessary, how can one justify that Mr. Wolin “forgot,” for months and months, to ask me, at least out of courtesy, for my authorization to include a long text of mine in his book? Did he think I was dead? How can one justify that, even afterward, he left me in the dark so that I had to discover his book in a store during a trip to New York? How is one to understand the fact that Mr. Sheehan, who claims to have conducted an exhaustive and impeccable inquiry on this question, vehemently takes the side of Mr. Wolin but “forgets” as well, for months and months, to get in touch with me? What is the most “embarrassing” here, “to say the very least” (I am deliberately employing the words that are so abused by Mr. Sheehan’s rhetoric as to render them immediately suspect)? And “embarrassing” for whom? Is it “hard to divine”?

3. As I have already said, the serious translation deficiencies, which I consider “not unimportant,” were not my first concern. But I nevertheless continue to find this translation “execrable.” There are many more mistakes than “three, at most, that are even worth talking about” as Mr. Sheehan claims. Counting only the most serious ones, I have found at least two per page and the text has nine pages! If Mr. Sheehan disagrees with this or if, in good faith, he is not aware of it, then I must conclude that his knowledge of language (at least the French language) and the demands he makes of a translator are as lax as those of Mr. Wolin.

4. Naturally I will make the list of these mistakes available to whoever may wish to consult it. And since Mr. Sheehan seems to think he is intimidating heaven knows who by this proposition, I declare that I am ready, for my part and from the outset, to communicate to whoever asks me all the correspondence I have on the subject (in particular the letters exchanged between Mr. Wolin and myself). If moreover it is possible to publish all these documents, including Mr. Wolin’s unpublished preface, in fair conditions, I accept to do so and would see only an advantage in it. One would then know for whom this is in fact “embarrassing,” whom it “embarrasses” the most, and who, as one says in French, ne s’est pas embarrassé de scrupules, that is, was not bothered by scruples throughout this whole episode.

5. But I do not make any commitment to explain publicly and in detail why my evaluation of Mr. Wolin’s work is, I repeat, “negative.” First of all because I do not have the time and there are more urgent things to do. Next because I would never have offered a public evaluation of Mr. Wolin’s behavior or work if Mr. Sheehan had not compelled me to do so when he took the initiative to quote from my letters while all the time piling up counter-truths and bad faith arguments. Does Mr. Sheehan really believe one should be obliged to explain oneself publicly and in the press each time one judges a book to be bad, when one prefers not to share the responsibility for it, especially to the point of figuring in spite of oneself as author, and still less when one has not been previously alerted to that fact? Does he want to call on me from now on to justify myself in public and in the press each time I disagree with what I read? Or each time what I read bores me or doesn’t interest me? Or each time I refuse to write, speak, or publish here or there? Not to mention the practical consequences of such a constraint, I wonder about the political regime and quite simply the public space in which one would then have us live.

Jacques Derrida

Ecole des Hautes Etudes

en Sciences Sociales

Paris, France

To the Editors:

I’ve just read in your issue of February 11 the exchange of letters between Jacques Derrida and Thomas Sheehan concerning Richard Wolin’s book and the interview that I conducted for Le Nouvel Observateur in October 1987. I take the liberty of making the following comments:

Le Nouvel Observateur, in fact, like all journals, sells the reprint rights of its articles or interviews abroad. The sale of rights is made almost mechanically with foreign magazines that request them, and there are even agreements in which sales are made automatically with a certain number of European journals. As a general rule, Ruth Valentini, who is responsible for the sale of rights, does not get permission from the authors for the simple reason that this would be a full-time job in itself. To take just this example, the interview with Jacques Derrida was translated in many countries, and it would have been impossible to consult with him each time a request was made to the journal. Besides, Jacques Derrida, who has often had foreign versions of this article in hand, has never raised the least objection on this subject because it always involved journals of very high stature (El Pais in Spain, for example).

But the affair that concerns us, and that you bizarrely call “l’affaire Derrida,” is an entirely different case, because it is not a question of a journal but a book. And especially, of a book that not only reprints the entire interview of 1987, but comments hostilely on it, which Ruth Valentini obviously could not have known when she sold the rights to Columbia University Press (a sale of rights that was in any case valid for only one edition, which did not therefore include a new paperback edition).

In these conditions, it seems to me completely natural that Jacques Derrida would assert his rights (legally incontestable) to this interview and would object to Mr. Wolin’s failure to ask his permission, in addition to the Nouvel Observateur‘s.