"Julius Caesar" and the democracy to come

This essay was originally delivered as a lecture in French, `Le poète¿ (trans. Geoffrey Bennington), at `La démocratie à venir (autour de Jacques Derrida)¿, a décade at Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, in July 2002. It was subsequently published in La démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 567-82; and in English as `The Poet: Julius Caesar and the Democracy to Come¿, in Angles on Derrida: Jacques Derrida and Anglophone Literature, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, special issue of the Oxford Literary Review, vol. 25 (2003) (pub. 2004), 39-61. It then underwent significant revision for publication in the volume entitled Julius Caesar in Western Culture, ed. Maria Wyke (Blackwell, 2006).