"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."
Probably, but not in any interesting way.
He said that in 1993. The world population in 1993 was 5.5bil people.
The world population had only reached 2bil people in mid-1920s.
So if you nearly triple the population, you can say more people, in absolute figures, are in almost any category you can think of.
It is completely reasonable to agree with Derida's statement while simultaneously saying that people, in general, are far better off today than in any other time in human history.