BOOK REVIEW The two gentlemen of
Europe Philosophy in a Time of
Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida, edited by Giovanna
Borradori.
Reviewed by Piyush Mathur
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' standpoint As 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.
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.
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May 15, 2004
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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. 
