Hebarmas & Derrida
BOOK REVIEW:
The Two Gentlemen of EuropePhilosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,
edited by Giovanna Borradori.
reviewed by Piyush Mathur [from Asia Times]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE15Aa01.html
I would have been grateful if Giovanna Borradori had titled this book more reasonably, and called it, instead, "9/11: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida". Then, I would not have had to remind us, as I must now, that no two European gentlemen, topmost philosophers as they might be, can (be made to) represent philosophy any more than Osama bin Laden can (be made to) represent all the terrorists in the world, or September 11 to symbolize or even epitomize all the terror since the attacks on the twin towers or through history.
Likewise, much of humanity has not seen a time without terror for a very long time; so, those cognizant of that interminable terror world-wide are apt to chuckle at the inherent claim in the book's title to an onset of terror. Terror has been far too pervasive for far too long for one to come up and declare the contemporary times as a time of terror - and then pretend to offer some new philosophy strictly responsive to it.
The politics of representation are rather important to this book; had they not been, I would have perhaps stopped short of being so brusque for a start as above or nit-picky with the title. As a manufactured intellectual product, Philosophy in a Time of Terror embodies a sweeping normative claim to knowing what constitutes philosophy, terror and philosophy in a time of terror. As a collection of interviews with Habermas and Derrida, the book has us encounter the most authoritative representatives - the mutually dissenting founding fathers - respectively, of the streams of thought called the Second Frankfurt School (in Germany) and Deconstruction (in France). Through her interviews and their explanations, Borradori also frames Habermas and Derrida as spokesmen for philosophy, Europe and European philosophy.
The representative character of the book is strengthened by the fact that Habermas and Derrida have previously taken it on themselves - with sufficient legitimacy, I believe - to represent and address Europe on the level of philosophy and to articulate its composite conceptual or intellectual futures. (Perhaps more often that that, they have been called on by concerned communities to do the same.) Finally, Borradori has brought out the book as a follow-up to a concerted popular-press offensive by leading European philosophers against American foreign policy and in response to the global cultural-political scenario post September 11. (That line of action was spearheaded by Habermas and had received the attention of significant sections of the global literati.)
Of course, these noble, clearly aggrieved individuals - these traumatized members of the European academic noblesse, if you will - had bigger issues in mind as well: the possible political role and cultural identity of Europe, America and the West; the future effects of the American empire; the future of human rights, peace, democracy, citizenship, globalization, capitalism, Islamic politics, and so on. Insofar as most academics - elite, European, or otherwise - do not condescend to the journalistic sphere to share their wisdom with the rest of the literate populace, or are not allowed into that sphere thanks to the "quality-conscious" editors of the popular press, a joint surprise by these philosophers and their pop-editors had then felt nice!
Now, insofar as "an awful lot of" academic work is clerical (per Noam Chomsky's cynical estimate), and the larger part of journalistic analysis world wide is little more than propaganda on behalf of the powerful and the ethically misguided (in my view), it is, yet again, a welcome scenario whereby we could read these influential philosophical figures in this book on issues of immediate public relevance. For all that, Borradori has to be complimented for orchestrating these interviews even though my first advice to the reader would be to ignore all the entries in the book by Borradori herself (excepting the brilliantly phrased questions). Besides being insipid and shallow, Borradori's entries - the preface, introduction, and two lengthy "explanations" -are pointless and, in many ways, misleading.
Habermas' standpointAs for the responses by Habermas: I regret to say that his regular-academic-fans are unlikely to find much new; those who keep up with the popular press shall have a similar experience as far as thinking about the global situation post September 11 is concerned. The banality of Habermas' observations is particularly evident in the sections on the interconnections between "the West" and the rest (especially the Islamic world). In those sections, he reiterates the conventional belief in the internal cultural cohesiveness of the West, characterized as a "materialist" and "secularizing force" (pg 33) - and as a "scapegoat for the Arab world's own, very real experiences of loss, suffered by populations torn out of their cultural traditions during processes of accelerated modernization" (pg 32).
Habermas contrasts that "accelerated modernization" of the Arab world with the modernization of Europe "experienced under more favorable circumstances as a process of productive destruction" (pg 32). Missing are any references to the protracted history of colonialism and slavery - the two factors that fueled the economics of European modernization in the main and were anything but productive as far as world history is concerned.
Coupled with the preclusion of those two factors from Habermas's view of modern, contemporary Europe is his erroneous belief that "We in the West do live in peaceful and well-to-do societies [which] contain a structural violence that ... we have gotten used to [such as] unconscionable social inequality, degrading discrimination, pauperization, and marginalization..." (pg 35). As far as I am concerned, Habermas defaults there by exercising the we/they logic, pre-securing a highly selective, comfortable strata of an industrialized region for the denomination of "the West", and continuing to be convinced about peace and welfare within that region even beyond September 11 - presumably, also, at the exclusion of a variety of prior, rather sustained, experiences in both large-scale and sporadic violence in Eastern Europe, (the former) USSR, Italy, Spain, and, for that matter, Greece and Turkey.
In any case, World War II did not occur that long ago to be erased already from the image of modern Europe/the West/the world. Furthermore, within the so-called homeland of the United States (presumably included in Habermas' West), no accounting of terrorism or peace in the contemporary times could be complete without reference to the deaths and injury from regular gun violence.
We are also at a complete loss as to whether Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Singapore and Hong Kong are included in Habermas' West - and, if not, why not. The mixed cultures and racial histories of the Caribbean islands and Latin America further complicate any preclusive, peaceful picture of the West. For all the above reasons, Habermas' West, entirely in line with the standard populist notions about the same, is at least twice fictitious - once, on the level of geographical, racial, and cultural identities; and, again, on the level of its own civic and political image.
Realizing the fallacious foundations of Habermas' political vision allows us to grasp why he would also seek an ultimately evangelical role for "the West" in the post-September 11 scenario. As such, what "the West could learn" from September 11, according to Habermas, is "how it would need to change its politics if it wants to be perceived as a shaping power with a civilizing impact" (pg 36).
There is a great deal of self-centrism tucked inside the syntactical layers of the above statement - very little of which points to any genuine learning agenda. So here we have a philosopher who sounds like a diplomat or a public relations officer worried about how others perceive his own: somebody needs to remind him that a civilizing power does not itself need to be either civil or civilized, and it matters only that much as to who perceives what and whether. Indeed, many a civilizing power through the history has been something other than civil or civilized: perhaps some compromise with one's own civility is a precondition to one's participation in any civilizing mission.
Derrida's confessions
I call Derrida's responses "confessions" because, while being incisive, they point inwardly and are otherwise calibrated well cognitively, idiomatically and politically. He invites us to question the meaning of "9/11" and to wonder about why it has become such a universal term of reference. He reasons that the significance attached to September 11 has to do with the fact that "the world order that felt itself targeted through this violence is dominated largely by the Anglo-American idiom" - which in turn dominates "the world stage ... international law, diplomatic institutions, the media, and the greatest technoscientific, capitalistic, and military power" (pg 88).
For all that, but also for a number of other reasons - such as the endlessness of the American territory and interest, the prior training of the September 11 attackers within the US, "the formation of Arab Muslim terrorist networks equipped and trained during the Cold War", and the "politico-military circumstances" perpetrated by the United States that favored the "emergence" and "shifts in allegiance" of the ilk of bin Laden - Derrida deems September 11 as suicide rather than homicide (pg 91-95). Since September 11 was a literal suicide attack, Derrida calls it a "double suicide" - but he deems it less than an event insofar as it did not fulfill the criterion of surprise or incomprehensibility (pg 95). "It was not impossible," he correctly argues, "to foresee an attack on American soil by those called 'terrorists' ... against a highly sensitive, spectacular, extremely symbolic building or institution" (pg 91).
In general, then, Derrida persuades us to view September 11, its fall-out, and world affairs on the whole from this resolutely internalized, internalizing perspective - in which, insofar as American interests know no end, the discursive comprehension of the attacks can only be a domestic responsibility for everybody. The present-day global terror thus turns out to be "an autoimmunity terror" - rather than an attack from the outsiders - especially for the Americans and Europeans. "The United States and Europe," Derrida stresses, "are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the 'terrorists' of the world. No geography, no 'territorial' determination, is thus pertinent any longer for locating the seat of these new technologies of transmission or aggression" (pg 101).
Because contemporary global terror is an internal matter, its "repression ... whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy - ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm" (pg 99). In such a scenario, Derrida argues, "the 'bombs' will never be 'smart' enough to prevent the victims (military and/or civilian, another distinction that has become less and reliable) from responding, either in person or by proxy, with what it will then be easy for them to present as legitimate reprisals or as counterterrorism. And so on ad infinitum ..." (pg 100).
The relationship between territory and terrorism remains a central issue to Derrida's formulations. He underlines that the popularization of the word "terrorism" in political history is traceable to "the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, a terror that was carried out in the name of the state and that in fact presupposed a legal monopoly on violence" (pg 103). He also points to the "terrorism carried out by the Algerian rebellion", which "was long considered a domestic phenomenon insofar as Algeria was supposed to be an integral part of French national territory", whereas "the French terrorism of the time (carried out by the state) was presented as a police operation for internal security" (pg 104). He notes: "It was only in the 1990s, decades later, that the French Parliament retrospectively conferred the status of "war" (and thus the status of an international confrontation) upon this conflict so as to be able to pay the pensions of the 'veterans' who claimed them" (pg 104).
As such, the criteria for defining "international terrorism" remain "obscure, dogmatic, and precritical" (pg 103). Citing the hasty post-September 11 authorization by the United Nations to the United States "to use any means ... to protect itself against this so-called 'international terrorism'", Derrida argues that "the more confused the concept the more it lends itself to an opportunistic appropriation" (pg 103-104).
As if to address that problem, and in response to Borradori's questions, Derrida normatively defines the future philosopher - "philosopher-deconstructor" - as someone who would reflect responsibly on the definitional questions related to terrorism and "demand accountability from those in charge of public discourses [and] the language and institutions of international law" (pg 106). Such a philosopher would also articulate the effective relationship between "our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant [and mutating] juridico-political system"; she/he would also seek "a new criteriology to distinguish between 'comprehending' and 'justifying' [terrorism]" (pg 106).
Of course, and even if by default, Derrida sets himself up as a prototype of precisely such a philosopher. Having called into question the standard perceptions of (international) terrorism, he asserts: "One can thus condemn unconditionally, as I do here, the attack of September 11 without having to ignore the real or alleged conditions that made it possible" (pgs 106-107). Blaming "the technoeconomic power of the media" for reinforcing the "narrow meaning" for terrorism, he points out that terrorism does not always depend on a "conscious subject" - but may gain its own, independent operative momentum (pg 109).
As a corollary, Derrida argues that "maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of 'September 11', the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare 'war on terrorism' "(pg 108). "In both cases," he observes, "certain parties have an interest in presenting their adversaries not only as terrorists ... but only as terrorists, indeed as 'international terrorists' who share the same logic or are part of the same network and who must thus be opposed ... not through counterterrorism but through a 'war', meaning, of course, a 'nice clean' war" (pg 110). Derrida's verdict is that "these distinctions are lacking in rigor, impossible to maintain, and easily manipulated for certain ends" (pg 110).
Regarding a long-term response to the post-September 11 scenario, Derrida urges respect for international law and institutions (pg 114); advocates resisting "American hegemony" rather than the United States (pg 117); accepts the necessity of "a unified [and autonomous] military force" for Europe (pg 119); underlines his personal utopian trust in the perfectibility of the ever-imperfect world (pgs 113, 114, 115); argues in favor of the ethic of "hospitality" rather than mere "tolerance" (pgs 126-129); rallies support for human rights (pg 132); recommends using Europe's Enlightenment experience "in the relationship between the political and ... the religious" on a world scale (pg 117); and puts forward his idea of "democracy to come" - as an advance over state - and polity-centered prior notions such as cosmopolitanism and world citizenship (pg 130).
That said, Derrida does not advocate anarchy nor does he seek to dilute or negate the political. "We must," he insists, "be dutiful beyond duty, we must go beyond law, tolerance, conditional hospitality, economy, and so on. But to go beyond does not mean to discredit that which we exceed" (pg 133).
Concluding remarks
Derrida's reflections are unquestionably worthy for their stress on conceptual reformulation of terrorism, as is Habermas's leadership of fellow European philosophers to their famous journalistic intervention past the September 11 attacks. The drama of this entire intervention, however, actually points up the duo's erstwhile neglect of vital and long-standing issues in global politics as played out within the public, activist, and journalistic spheres. So, at best, these two individuals make an arduously late pop-up on the effective global public stage (contrast them, for example, with Noam Chomsky and Edward Said); at worst, they are academic tigers now determined to get out of their jungle.
For all that, I am not so confident of Derrida's confident responses to Borradori's questions related to the role and place of philosophy in a time of terror. The philosophizing of terror and terrorism - their sophisticated defining and redefining - took place elsewhere and was done by a whole host of other intellectuals, writers, activists and politicians.
Dating back to the 1960s are of course the political and strategic analyses - an elaborate contention against standard notions about terror and terrorism - by Chomsky and Said. In addition are Ashis Nandy's direct and rather insightful reflections on terrorism in the early 1990s - well before bin Laden was picked up by the press - as is his brilliant essay in the wake of the September 11 attacks in "The Romance of the State" (2002). Likewise, James Der Derian provided cogent theoretical formulations on the topic in his book Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (1992). In most ways, Vandana Shiva's ecofeminist exposes, dating back to the 1980s, are de facto philosophical treatises on various kinds of terrorism as are the political tracts brought out more recently by Arundhati Roy - and, far prior to that, by Hannah Arendt.
Then, we have such political stalwarts as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr and Aung Sang Su-Ki, to mention just a few. Almost each one of the above has directly "questioned" terror and terrorism. However, Habermas and Derrida - unlike Chomsky, Said and Nandy (also academics) - do not even acknowledge them as such and the cosmopolitan traditions of thought and action of which many of them are a part.
So long as Habermas and Derrida - and their associates - stick to their intellectual provincialism and academic and textual purism, they shouldn't expect to make much more than the "embarrassing" splash of a latecomer through such occasional public interventions as the present one.
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Piyush Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of JNU, New Delhi, and Virginia Tech, USA, is an independent observer of world affairs, the environment, science and technology policy, and literature.
Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; ISBN: 0-226-0664-9 (cloth); 208 pages; US $25.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
The Two Gentlemen of EuropePhilosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,
edited by Giovanna Borradori.
reviewed by Piyush Mathur [from Asia Times]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE15Aa01.html
I would have been grateful if Giovanna Borradori had titled this book more reasonably, and called it, instead, "9/11: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida". Then, I would not have had to remind us, as I must now, that no two European gentlemen, topmost philosophers as they might be, can (be made to) represent philosophy any more than Osama bin Laden can (be made to) represent all the terrorists in the world, or September 11 to symbolize or even epitomize all the terror since the attacks on the twin towers or through history.
Likewise, much of humanity has not seen a time without terror for a very long time; so, those cognizant of that interminable terror world-wide are apt to chuckle at the inherent claim in the book's title to an onset of terror. Terror has been far too pervasive for far too long for one to come up and declare the contemporary times as a time of terror - and then pretend to offer some new philosophy strictly responsive to it.
The politics of representation are rather important to this book; had they not been, I would have perhaps stopped short of being so brusque for a start as above or nit-picky with the title. As a manufactured intellectual product, Philosophy in a Time of Terror embodies a sweeping normative claim to knowing what constitutes philosophy, terror and philosophy in a time of terror. As a collection of interviews with Habermas and Derrida, the book has us encounter the most authoritative representatives - the mutually dissenting founding fathers - respectively, of the streams of thought called the Second Frankfurt School (in Germany) and Deconstruction (in France). Through her interviews and their explanations, Borradori also frames Habermas and Derrida as spokesmen for philosophy, Europe and European philosophy.
The representative character of the book is strengthened by the fact that Habermas and Derrida have previously taken it on themselves - with sufficient legitimacy, I believe - to represent and address Europe on the level of philosophy and to articulate its composite conceptual or intellectual futures. (Perhaps more often that that, they have been called on by concerned communities to do the same.) Finally, Borradori has brought out the book as a follow-up to a concerted popular-press offensive by leading European philosophers against American foreign policy and in response to the global cultural-political scenario post September 11. (That line of action was spearheaded by Habermas and had received the attention of significant sections of the global literati.)
Of course, these noble, clearly aggrieved individuals - these traumatized members of the European academic noblesse, if you will - had bigger issues in mind as well: the possible political role and cultural identity of Europe, America and the West; the future effects of the American empire; the future of human rights, peace, democracy, citizenship, globalization, capitalism, Islamic politics, and so on. Insofar as most academics - elite, European, or otherwise - do not condescend to the journalistic sphere to share their wisdom with the rest of the literate populace, or are not allowed into that sphere thanks to the "quality-conscious" editors of the popular press, a joint surprise by these philosophers and their pop-editors had then felt nice!
Now, insofar as "an awful lot of" academic work is clerical (per Noam Chomsky's cynical estimate), and the larger part of journalistic analysis world wide is little more than propaganda on behalf of the powerful and the ethically misguided (in my view), it is, yet again, a welcome scenario whereby we could read these influential philosophical figures in this book on issues of immediate public relevance. For all that, Borradori has to be complimented for orchestrating these interviews even though my first advice to the reader would be to ignore all the entries in the book by Borradori herself (excepting the brilliantly phrased questions). Besides being insipid and shallow, Borradori's entries - the preface, introduction, and two lengthy "explanations" -are pointless and, in many ways, misleading.
Habermas' standpointAs for the responses by Habermas: I regret to say that his regular-academic-fans are unlikely to find much new; those who keep up with the popular press shall have a similar experience as far as thinking about the global situation post September 11 is concerned. The banality of Habermas' observations is particularly evident in the sections on the interconnections between "the West" and the rest (especially the Islamic world). In those sections, he reiterates the conventional belief in the internal cultural cohesiveness of the West, characterized as a "materialist" and "secularizing force" (pg 33) - and as a "scapegoat for the Arab world's own, very real experiences of loss, suffered by populations torn out of their cultural traditions during processes of accelerated modernization" (pg 32).
Habermas contrasts that "accelerated modernization" of the Arab world with the modernization of Europe "experienced under more favorable circumstances as a process of productive destruction" (pg 32). Missing are any references to the protracted history of colonialism and slavery - the two factors that fueled the economics of European modernization in the main and were anything but productive as far as world history is concerned.
Coupled with the preclusion of those two factors from Habermas's view of modern, contemporary Europe is his erroneous belief that "We in the West do live in peaceful and well-to-do societies [which] contain a structural violence that ... we have gotten used to [such as] unconscionable social inequality, degrading discrimination, pauperization, and marginalization..." (pg 35). As far as I am concerned, Habermas defaults there by exercising the we/they logic, pre-securing a highly selective, comfortable strata of an industrialized region for the denomination of "the West", and continuing to be convinced about peace and welfare within that region even beyond September 11 - presumably, also, at the exclusion of a variety of prior, rather sustained, experiences in both large-scale and sporadic violence in Eastern Europe, (the former) USSR, Italy, Spain, and, for that matter, Greece and Turkey.
In any case, World War II did not occur that long ago to be erased already from the image of modern Europe/the West/the world. Furthermore, within the so-called homeland of the United States (presumably included in Habermas' West), no accounting of terrorism or peace in the contemporary times could be complete without reference to the deaths and injury from regular gun violence.
We are also at a complete loss as to whether Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Singapore and Hong Kong are included in Habermas' West - and, if not, why not. The mixed cultures and racial histories of the Caribbean islands and Latin America further complicate any preclusive, peaceful picture of the West. For all the above reasons, Habermas' West, entirely in line with the standard populist notions about the same, is at least twice fictitious - once, on the level of geographical, racial, and cultural identities; and, again, on the level of its own civic and political image.
Realizing the fallacious foundations of Habermas' political vision allows us to grasp why he would also seek an ultimately evangelical role for "the West" in the post-September 11 scenario. As such, what "the West could learn" from September 11, according to Habermas, is "how it would need to change its politics if it wants to be perceived as a shaping power with a civilizing impact" (pg 36).
There is a great deal of self-centrism tucked inside the syntactical layers of the above statement - very little of which points to any genuine learning agenda. So here we have a philosopher who sounds like a diplomat or a public relations officer worried about how others perceive his own: somebody needs to remind him that a civilizing power does not itself need to be either civil or civilized, and it matters only that much as to who perceives what and whether. Indeed, many a civilizing power through the history has been something other than civil or civilized: perhaps some compromise with one's own civility is a precondition to one's participation in any civilizing mission.
Derrida's confessions
I call Derrida's responses "confessions" because, while being incisive, they point inwardly and are otherwise calibrated well cognitively, idiomatically and politically. He invites us to question the meaning of "9/11" and to wonder about why it has become such a universal term of reference. He reasons that the significance attached to September 11 has to do with the fact that "the world order that felt itself targeted through this violence is dominated largely by the Anglo-American idiom" - which in turn dominates "the world stage ... international law, diplomatic institutions, the media, and the greatest technoscientific, capitalistic, and military power" (pg 88).
For all that, but also for a number of other reasons - such as the endlessness of the American territory and interest, the prior training of the September 11 attackers within the US, "the formation of Arab Muslim terrorist networks equipped and trained during the Cold War", and the "politico-military circumstances" perpetrated by the United States that favored the "emergence" and "shifts in allegiance" of the ilk of bin Laden - Derrida deems September 11 as suicide rather than homicide (pg 91-95). Since September 11 was a literal suicide attack, Derrida calls it a "double suicide" - but he deems it less than an event insofar as it did not fulfill the criterion of surprise or incomprehensibility (pg 95). "It was not impossible," he correctly argues, "to foresee an attack on American soil by those called 'terrorists' ... against a highly sensitive, spectacular, extremely symbolic building or institution" (pg 91).
In general, then, Derrida persuades us to view September 11, its fall-out, and world affairs on the whole from this resolutely internalized, internalizing perspective - in which, insofar as American interests know no end, the discursive comprehension of the attacks can only be a domestic responsibility for everybody. The present-day global terror thus turns out to be "an autoimmunity terror" - rather than an attack from the outsiders - especially for the Americans and Europeans. "The United States and Europe," Derrida stresses, "are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the 'terrorists' of the world. No geography, no 'territorial' determination, is thus pertinent any longer for locating the seat of these new technologies of transmission or aggression" (pg 101).
Because contemporary global terror is an internal matter, its "repression ... whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy - ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm" (pg 99). In such a scenario, Derrida argues, "the 'bombs' will never be 'smart' enough to prevent the victims (military and/or civilian, another distinction that has become less and reliable) from responding, either in person or by proxy, with what it will then be easy for them to present as legitimate reprisals or as counterterrorism. And so on ad infinitum ..." (pg 100).
The relationship between territory and terrorism remains a central issue to Derrida's formulations. He underlines that the popularization of the word "terrorism" in political history is traceable to "the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, a terror that was carried out in the name of the state and that in fact presupposed a legal monopoly on violence" (pg 103). He also points to the "terrorism carried out by the Algerian rebellion", which "was long considered a domestic phenomenon insofar as Algeria was supposed to be an integral part of French national territory", whereas "the French terrorism of the time (carried out by the state) was presented as a police operation for internal security" (pg 104). He notes: "It was only in the 1990s, decades later, that the French Parliament retrospectively conferred the status of "war" (and thus the status of an international confrontation) upon this conflict so as to be able to pay the pensions of the 'veterans' who claimed them" (pg 104).
As such, the criteria for defining "international terrorism" remain "obscure, dogmatic, and precritical" (pg 103). Citing the hasty post-September 11 authorization by the United Nations to the United States "to use any means ... to protect itself against this so-called 'international terrorism'", Derrida argues that "the more confused the concept the more it lends itself to an opportunistic appropriation" (pg 103-104).
As if to address that problem, and in response to Borradori's questions, Derrida normatively defines the future philosopher - "philosopher-deconstructor" - as someone who would reflect responsibly on the definitional questions related to terrorism and "demand accountability from those in charge of public discourses [and] the language and institutions of international law" (pg 106). Such a philosopher would also articulate the effective relationship between "our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant [and mutating] juridico-political system"; she/he would also seek "a new criteriology to distinguish between 'comprehending' and 'justifying' [terrorism]" (pg 106).
Of course, and even if by default, Derrida sets himself up as a prototype of precisely such a philosopher. Having called into question the standard perceptions of (international) terrorism, he asserts: "One can thus condemn unconditionally, as I do here, the attack of September 11 without having to ignore the real or alleged conditions that made it possible" (pgs 106-107). Blaming "the technoeconomic power of the media" for reinforcing the "narrow meaning" for terrorism, he points out that terrorism does not always depend on a "conscious subject" - but may gain its own, independent operative momentum (pg 109).
As a corollary, Derrida argues that "maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of 'September 11', the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare 'war on terrorism' "(pg 108). "In both cases," he observes, "certain parties have an interest in presenting their adversaries not only as terrorists ... but only as terrorists, indeed as 'international terrorists' who share the same logic or are part of the same network and who must thus be opposed ... not through counterterrorism but through a 'war', meaning, of course, a 'nice clean' war" (pg 110). Derrida's verdict is that "these distinctions are lacking in rigor, impossible to maintain, and easily manipulated for certain ends" (pg 110).
Regarding a long-term response to the post-September 11 scenario, Derrida urges respect for international law and institutions (pg 114); advocates resisting "American hegemony" rather than the United States (pg 117); accepts the necessity of "a unified [and autonomous] military force" for Europe (pg 119); underlines his personal utopian trust in the perfectibility of the ever-imperfect world (pgs 113, 114, 115); argues in favor of the ethic of "hospitality" rather than mere "tolerance" (pgs 126-129); rallies support for human rights (pg 132); recommends using Europe's Enlightenment experience "in the relationship between the political and ... the religious" on a world scale (pg 117); and puts forward his idea of "democracy to come" - as an advance over state - and polity-centered prior notions such as cosmopolitanism and world citizenship (pg 130).
That said, Derrida does not advocate anarchy nor does he seek to dilute or negate the political. "We must," he insists, "be dutiful beyond duty, we must go beyond law, tolerance, conditional hospitality, economy, and so on. But to go beyond does not mean to discredit that which we exceed" (pg 133).
Concluding remarks
Derrida's reflections are unquestionably worthy for their stress on conceptual reformulation of terrorism, as is Habermas's leadership of fellow European philosophers to their famous journalistic intervention past the September 11 attacks. The drama of this entire intervention, however, actually points up the duo's erstwhile neglect of vital and long-standing issues in global politics as played out within the public, activist, and journalistic spheres. So, at best, these two individuals make an arduously late pop-up on the effective global public stage (contrast them, for example, with Noam Chomsky and Edward Said); at worst, they are academic tigers now determined to get out of their jungle.
For all that, I am not so confident of Derrida's confident responses to Borradori's questions related to the role and place of philosophy in a time of terror. The philosophizing of terror and terrorism - their sophisticated defining and redefining - took place elsewhere and was done by a whole host of other intellectuals, writers, activists and politicians.
Dating back to the 1960s are of course the political and strategic analyses - an elaborate contention against standard notions about terror and terrorism - by Chomsky and Said. In addition are Ashis Nandy's direct and rather insightful reflections on terrorism in the early 1990s - well before bin Laden was picked up by the press - as is his brilliant essay in the wake of the September 11 attacks in "The Romance of the State" (2002). Likewise, James Der Derian provided cogent theoretical formulations on the topic in his book Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (1992). In most ways, Vandana Shiva's ecofeminist exposes, dating back to the 1980s, are de facto philosophical treatises on various kinds of terrorism as are the political tracts brought out more recently by Arundhati Roy - and, far prior to that, by Hannah Arendt.
Then, we have such political stalwarts as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr and Aung Sang Su-Ki, to mention just a few. Almost each one of the above has directly "questioned" terror and terrorism. However, Habermas and Derrida - unlike Chomsky, Said and Nandy (also academics) - do not even acknowledge them as such and the cosmopolitan traditions of thought and action of which many of them are a part.
So long as Habermas and Derrida - and their associates - stick to their intellectual provincialism and academic and textual purism, they shouldn't expect to make much more than the "embarrassing" splash of a latecomer through such occasional public interventions as the present one.
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Piyush Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of JNU, New Delhi, and Virginia Tech, USA, is an independent observer of world affairs, the environment, science and technology policy, and literature.
Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; ISBN: 0-226-0664-9 (cloth); 208 pages; US $25.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
posted by Roguentin at 10:05 PM
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