What Derrida Is Saying Gerald Owen, writing in Canada’s National Post, recently reminded us that back in May a major intellectual event took place–and it went nearly unnoticed outside Europe. It was the merging of the modern with the postmodern, in which a philosophical movement that began as a rebellion against modernism was finally absorbed back into modernism.
The occasion was a statement cosigned by Jürgen Habermas, high priest of the Frankfurt school of modern philosophy, and Jacques Derrida, dean of the postmodernists. Published in both the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the French Libération, it argues that Europe needs to take its place as the global counterweight to the United States–for the highest moral and metaphysical reasons. There wouldn’t have been all those problems with England before the war with Iraq if Europe had a transnational government powerful enough to squash someone like Tony Blair, and Europe needs such a government to halt American religious fanaticism: “In our latitudes, it would be hard to imagine a president who begins his daily official duties with a public prayer and links his important political decisions with a divine mission.”
There was a time when some of the postmodernists seemed, if not right, then at least amusing. All their silly jargon about the impotence of phallocentric rationality and the need to deconstruct the Eurocentric logos sawed against much of the old liberal project, and it was fun to see the liberals squirm while the postmodernists deconstructed them–drowning modernity in the same scorn that modernity had once poured on premodern times.
Quite how Derrida, a founding father of anti-Eurocentrism, can now embrace a European world-power is a little hard to grasp, but it turns out that leftist modern philosophy is subject to ridicule only while that philosophy is winning. When the world looks as though it might not actually be turning into a global Sweden–with socialist economics, high secularism, and sexual libertarianism all triumphant–the postmodernists scurry back into the leftist fold. Anything, even Habermas, is better than the United States.
HABERMAS AND DERRIDA also combined for a set of interviews in October 2001, recently published in a book called “Philosophy in a Time of Terror.” Unconscious self-revelation is always fun, and here’s Derrida on the terror attacks against the United States on September 11:
You are inviting me to speak here by recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives. . . . “Something” took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing.”
But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event,” remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.
We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy–a name, a number–points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.
There is much more to this lovely passage than we’ve quoted here. But the line “we do not yet know what we are talking about” will remain as an epitaph for Jacques Derrida, the one line we will remember from him long after he’s gone.
