ABSTRACT
At the end of December 1981, as American philosophers were convened in Philadelphia for the yearly meeting of the American Philosophical Association, their French colleague Jacques Derrida was leaving a much smaller, but perhaps no less important, meeting in Prague. e conference was sponsored by Charter 77, a Czech dissident group, together with the Jan Hus Society, a French group formed to aid Czech intellectuals who had lost their jobs, and of which Derrida was vice president. Charter 77 was not an o cially approved organization in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic – to say the least – so the meeting had not received the required authorization from the Czechoslovakian government. At the airport, Derrida’s luggage was searched, and drugs were found. e idea that anyone, let alone a prominent philosopher, would be smuggling drugs out of one of Eastern Europe’s strictest police states was patently ridiculous; Derrida himself later said that he believed the drugs had been planted in his suitcase while he was visiting the grave of Franz Ka a. In any case, he was interrogated for eight hours, arrested and taken to prison. ere, he was stripped, le naked for a time, and then placed in a cell. A er twenty-four hours, intercession by the French government obtained his release, and he was placed on a train to West Germany. Unauthorized philosophizing was not to be tolerated in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.1
