Abstract

The appearance, in 1967, of the name of Jacques Derrida on the scene of contemporary thought was indeed plural; given the number of books published under his signature in that year, but also, more intrinsically, because this appearance was declined under a contradictory aegis: since the beginning, the problem of writing had to struggle between ‘two interpretations of interpretation’, one affirmative, the other nostalgic, between a Nietzschean affirmation and a Rousseauist reverie. This internal debate carried on its labour, remarking itself much later at the surface of the page, according to more or less conscious protocols. This contribution retraces the terms of this conflict starting from two problems, if not words, where this conflict finds a very economical condensation: ‘pity’ and ‘weak force’, the problems of compassion for the living and of the hyperbole of political interpellation, in the short-circuit that takes shape between the ‘economy of pity’ and the ‘question of the animal’.