It has become commonplace to take Immanuel Kant as the exemplary thinker of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Kant as the thinker of the ‘State’, of the ‘interstate’ and of the ‘cosmopolitical’ is a familiar figure. But what about Kant as the thinker of the ‘people’, of ‘fraternity’ and of the ‘nation’ – does such a Kant exist? Could we recognise the ‘national’ as something that is essentially and thoroughly embedded in Kant's work, something that demands further analysis in the same way his notion of the State does? Is the only legitimate question in the Kantian political dossier the question of the State – be it in the singular or in the plural? The aim of the following two chapters is to identify and reconstitute another strand of philosophical thinking in Kant, one about nationalities as they relate to philosophy, one which has been eclipsed and overlooked in his work, even if this eclipse, as we will see, had already been prefigured by Kant himself.

The place of Kant in Derrida's seminars on philosophical nationalities and nationalism is ostensibly peripheral. While there are brief excursions and examinations of Kant throughout the seminars, they are always pursued in relation to another thinker and another problem at hand. The most sustained examination of Kant's own writings in these seminars comes very early, in the second session of the first year, when Derrida offers a reading of Theodor Adorno's 1965 contribution to a radio broadcast entitled ‘On the Question: What is German?’ (Auf die Frage: Was ist Deutsch?) and in particular, Adorno's belief that Kantian thought is the best place of resistance to nationalism. Derrida observes that Adorno in this piece relies on an interpretation of Kant that places practical reason and autonomy at the centre of Kant's thought, rather than an emphasis on finitude and temporality in the imagination, as we find in Martin Heidegger's 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Derrida thus complicates any straightforward notion of the German inheritance of Kant, a difficulty he expands upon when he recalls the Davos debate – if a ‘debate’ is what it truly was, Derrida mindfully notes – between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer that led to Heidegger's text.