Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida isn’t confessing modesty here; he’s refusing a job description. The “intellectual playing his political role” evokes a familiar modern script: the thinker as certified conscience, stepping onstage at the right moments to deliver the correct denunciations, endorsements, and signatures. By calling it a “screenplay,” he frames political engagement as performance governed by cues, recognizable gestures, and a ready-made audience expectation. The bite is that this role feels less like ethics than casting.

“I have always had trouble recognizing myself” does double work. It’s personal disidentification, but it’s also a methodological move: Derrida’s philosophy is built on suspicion toward stable identities and inherited categories. He’s wary of the flattering mirror offered to public intellectuals, where “being political” becomes a legible persona rather than a risky encounter with complexity. The line quietly targets the heroism of the French engaged intellectual tradition (think Sartre), where moral authority can harden into brand.

“According to the screenplay that you are familiar with” recruits the reader as accomplice: you know the moves, you know the type. Derrida’s subtext is that this familiarity is the problem. Scripts make dissent predictable; they domesticate radicalism into something culturally consumable.

Then the sting: “whose heritage deserves to be questioned.” He doesn’t reject political responsibility; he questions the inheritance that dictates what responsible looks like. It’s a call to interrogate the institutions, media rituals, and ideological reflexes that choreograph intellectual life - and to invent forms of engagement that aren’t merely rehearsed.