Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut argue that "the philosophy of 68" eliminates and leaves no room for a positive rehabilitation of human agency necessary for a workable notion of democracy. In their Preface to the English Translation of "La pensee 68," Ferry and Renaut (1990a, p. xvi), refer to the philosophy of the sixties as a "Nietzschean-Heideggerian" antihumanism which is structurally incapable of taking up the promises of the democratic project inherent in modernity. Their criticisms are specifically aimed at Derrida and are intended as a path back to a form of humanism, liberalism and individualism (the doctrine of human rights) which they think can sustain a notion of political agency required for democracy. Derrida provides resources for understanding and responding to these criticisms. He denies a simple-minded nihilism as it applies to the subject, to notions of political agency and to the Idea of democracy and he argues that the anti-Nietzschean polemical attack on the critique of the subject is misplaced; that poststructuralism never "liquidated" the subject but rather rehabilitated it, decentred it and repositioned it, in all its historico-cultural complexity. This paper explores these issues in relation to the project for a critical pedagogy. (Contains 23 notes.)