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For this juncture is marked, and thought, by Heidegger with a notion that Derrida does not pursue, but that points back powerfully to the motif of performativity that is at the heart of Derrida’s proposals for the new Collège and may therefore help us grasp the link (or create a new one) between his understanding of the performative event and his understanding of the interruptive relation that leads him to speak increasingly of a “messianic” experience of justice. I refer here to Heidegger’s thought of “usage”—der Brauch.

27 This asceticism, and the distance from Heidegger (among others) that it entails, is forcefully articulated in Specters of Marx when Derrida draws out the disjuncture implicit in all jointure and argues that the “exposition” to which I have pointed in Heideggerian terms (the relation to an “impossible” implied by Heidegger’s notion of a human powerlessness) must be understood far more radically than Heidegger ever allowed. It must be understood in and from an abyssal structure of experience that involves a constant ex- or disappropriation.

Beyond immediate forms of intimidation in that period, I refer to the economic, The Claim of Language • 43 technocratic, and disciplinary forces that increasingly paralyze democratic life; one will recall that citizens were urged after 9/11 to resume their roles as consumers). But I am convinced that it ultimately could not appear because humanists were unprepared to say how the humanities could realize their role, and thus were unprepared to assert it. The existing assumptions about the role of the humanities in public life and education (their role in the development of cultural self-understanding, ethical and historical thinking, and so on) were largely ungrounded, or grounded in the most shallow fashion.