agglutinations.com

January 30, 2004

Conversation with Giovanna Borradori: Derrida, Habermas, and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003)

by Nader Vossoughian

As I learned from our recent interview, Borradori does not see Derrida and Habermas' joint statement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a "tactical alliance," as Wolin has argued, but as a natural extension of their respective philosophical projects.

NV: Would you take issue with Richard Wolin’s view that Habermas and Derrida’s statement (i.e., their call for a unified European foreign policy) was conceived “more as a tactical alliance than a philosophical one"?

GB: Yes, I would take issue, and very strongly. First of all, I don’t readily see what specific political purpose a tactical move of this kind would serve. Neither Habermas nor Derrida are running for office or sponsoring a referendum of any sort. Their role as public intellectuals has been to encourage critical thought. Instrumental alliances need to have concrete objectives, which I simply cannot imagine in this case.

But there is an additional reason why I would take issue with Wolin’s deflationary reading of Habermas and Derrida’s recent rapprochement. Their joint statement, which was published in several European countries at the same time, is a natural outgrowth of a very substantive exchange on the issue of global terrorism and the role of Europe in the post-9/11 era that they began, on my invitation, in the weeks after the collapse of the Twin Towers. In the late fall of 2001, as they were both in New York for separate academic engagements, they accepted the opportunity to respond to a parallel set of questions regarding the concept of terror, the status of terrorism as a political category, globalization, the role of existing multilateral institutions, and finally, the transition from classical international right to a new cosmopolitan order.

All the positions Habermas and Derrida offer in their joint public statement are already contained in these dialogues, which [do] not only articulate in depth the reasons why they hold them—reasons that are all but tactical—but highlight their common theoretical stem: the political and moral legacy of the Enlightenment.

There has been debate as to whether Derrida and Habermas’s interpretations of such a legacy can be reconciled. I believe that they can. Wolin probably believes that they cannot. But it is a difference in interpretation that does not undermine their belonging to the same lineage. They are debating the same texts, the same ideas, and the same ideals.

NV: Is the bond that you claim both Habermas and Derrida share with the Enlightenment a distinctive feature of European thought?

GB: Yes, I believe it is. The ongoing dialogue that Habermas and Derrida have engaged with Enlightenment thinkers, and particularly with Kant, has forged a common definition of philosophy’s political responsibility, which is distinctly European. In the Anglo-American tradition, philosophy and politics are kept separate: political involvement is interpreted as a matter of personal choice, while philosophy itself remains committed to the pursuit of timeless truth--the example of Noam Chomsky comes to mind. Chomsky's work on linguistics has remained completely detached from his work as a political activist.

By contrast, in the European or Continental tradition, philosophy itself is historically bound and becomes a response to the promises and the traumas of a specific age. Kant responded to the promise of the French revolution, and Hegel, to its terror; Sartre, meanwhile, made philosophy tell the tragedy of World War II. Habermas and Derrida follow in this belief that philosophy is bound up with its present, a two-hundred-year-old path inaugurated by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. This is why their joint statement is not just a matter of tactical alliance but a declaration of a common way of thinking about politics, which in my mind is particularly urgent precisely at our unstable time.

NV: How would you respond to Wolin’s contention that for Derrida “’law’ and ‘justice’ are antipodes,” that the one is incompatible with the other?

GB: [I very much disagree with his characterization.] In fact, Derrida’s treatise on the subject of “law” and “justice,” entitled “Force of Law,” makes it very clear that law and justice are not “antipodes,” contraries or opposites. Derrida’s point is that justice and law are two distinct concepts and that it is a mistake to reduce justice to law--a pervasive tendency in highly “legalized,” mature liberal democracies. Justice should not be reduced to law because not all laws are just, and in applying the law, the judge is exposed to the need of temporarily suspending [the] validity [of the very principle he or she seeks to uphold]. This suspension, which entails a legal void, is what Derrida envisages as the possibility of justice. In this sense, unlike law, justice is never fully actualized but always “to-come.” Obviously, this is not to say that there is a contrast of opposites between law and justice.

NV: Why are Derrida and Habermas both skeptical of the “war on terrorism?” How does it stand to challenge traditional notions about statehood and state authority?

GB: Habermas wants to make sure that when we speak about terrorism we discuss something different than large-scale organized crime, such as drug trafficking. This question is not even addressed by mainstream assessments of the threat of terrorism around the world, such as the report published in August 2003 by the World Markets Research, a centre of economic “intelligence” based in London, who placed Colombia in the first place in terms of risk of terrorist attacks. Provided that terrorism, in Colombia, is by and large inscribed in the drug trafficking scheme, can we wage war against a large-scale criminal organization? If terrorism is to be distinguished from ordinary crime it is only on the basis of its political content. But on what grounds was 9/11 a political act? For Habermas, the political content of terrorism is a function of the realism of its objectives. If its objectives are unrealistic—as would be the destruction of Western civilization, understood as the Empire of Evil--terrorism is not distinguishable from ordinary crime.

In contrast to Habermas, Derrida believes that terrorism is the symptom of an auto-immune disorder that affects our globalized world. Such auto-immunity plays itself out at several levels.

Historically, it is a fact that the US literally armed and trained the Islamic resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan (bin Laden was in it himself), which represents the military and strategic core of Al Qaeda. Psychologically, terrorism works on trauma and the dynamics of trauma, which demands that the victim repeat the traumatic memory to prove to herself that it is past. Terrorism plays on this dynamics by projecting itself into the future. Terrorism, says Derrida, inhabits the future as much as the past, so that is always still to be awaited, i.e. still to-come. Last but not least, terrorism feeds into the “breaking news” format that since 9/11 rules over the Western networks. By constantly reproducing the images of those falling towers, the media has naively bought into the dynamic of compulsive repetition as well as into the terrorists’ own wish that their act may be monumentalized, historicized, aggrandized, and spread all around the world. If this is the case, with terrorism, was does a traditional military intervention accomplish?

NV: You seem to feel that Derrida’s concept of “hospitality” inaugurates a major turn in his thinking. Why?

GB: Derrida’s treatment of hospitality comes straight from Kant. Hospitality is a more compassionate, and ultimately effective, alternative to tolerance. Tolerance is according to Derrida a paternalistic concept irremediably tainted by religious, and specifically Christian, implications developed in the Europe of the 1500s. For him, tolerance is a less neutral moral and political concept than it makes itself out to be. Also, he is bothered by the lack of authentic openness to the other that tolerance entails; the phrase “threshold of tolerance,” which was used in France to indicate the limit beyond which it was no longer decent to ask a national community to welcome any more foreigners and immigrants, reveals this problematic implication.

The issue of tolerance is interesting in terms of Habermas and Derrida’s joint declaration too, because it is an example of how different interpretations of the same issue, despite offering separate solutions, engage the same intellectual lineage. In contrast to Derrida, Habermas defends tolerance on the grounds of its universalism. It is true, he says, that every religion, because of its dependence on faith, hosts a dogmatic kernel of belief. However, in the modern epoch, religion has learned to see itself through the eyes of others, to exist within a plurality of different approaches by renouncing its claims to political power. This is the meaning of secularization.

NV: Have Derrida and Habermas confronted their similarities in their writings and public pronouncements?

GB: Their rapprochement is recent and, in my view, connected to the sense of urgency that 9/11 has presented them with, as public intellectuals. Both Habermas and Derrida believe that the challenge of global terrorism requires some kind of transition from classical international right, which is still based on the 19th century model of the nation-state, to a new cosmopolitan order, in which multilateral institutions and continent wide alliances will become the main political actors. While some of these institutions already exist, some of them will need to be created. And philosophy has a definite role in imagining what they could be.

Also, both Habermas and Derrida feel that terrorism is a dangerously elusive concept. The US administration makes use of the term “terrorism” as if its meaning were evident and transparent, which allows our government to treat the problem in purely “pragmatic” terms. But the problem is not only pragmatically complex but also theoretically vague. Has there ever been a war completely free of terrorism, namely the killing of civilians for the sake of the intimidation or swaying of a government? And what about the distinction between national and international terrorism, army and police, civil and military targets? Terrorism cannot be easily simplified: good on one side and evil on the other, “with us or against us.” And who is “us” anyway? Both Habermas and Derrida had the political acumen, in the weeks following 9/11, to foresee that the real conflict is not so much in the obsolete East and West distinction but rather between unilateralism and multilateralism, the US and Europe.

Finally, Europe seems to me as well as to Habermas and Derrida to emerge, in the post-9/11 world, as a real secular democracy with the potential of making a difference on the global scene. It is a model of a new political agent, which is neither an old nation-state, with all its territorial and ethnic roots, nor a pure and simple federation. Continental Europe is, in its essence, a multilateral and pluralistic unit with a long and painful memory of war. Tragedy is still vivid in the memory of all Europeans, old and young: its reluctance to take part to any segment of the war in Iraq has proved that it is a social and political experiment whose very gift, paradoxically, resides in its prudence.

Giovanna Borradori is associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College. She is the author of The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, and the editor of Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy.