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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.

Interpreting Abstraction: Interview with Franco Moretti

by Nader Vossoughian

In what follows I ask Professor Moretti to clarify some of the goals and premises of his research, particularly in the light of criticisms leveled against his quantitative methods by existential phenomenology and Critical Theory.

Q. My first question centers on the project of trying to forge a “more rational literary history.” In what way do you see your own quantitative methods as being more rational than the approaches utilized by historians past?

A. Braudel’s quote [i.e., that "history is... much more rational in its procedures and results, when it examines groups and repetitions"] explains it; the individual case is unpredictable, whereas a series often shows a regularity. Needless to say, my repetition of “rational” was also self-mockery.

Q. How would you respond to Georges Canguilhem’s criticism of physiologist Adolphe Quetelet, namely that quantitative statistics merely lends scientific legitimacy to existing social and cultural norms, that it tells us more about the “normal” and the “abnormal” than it does about the “true” and the “untrue”?

A. I don’t understand the question/objection. To begin with, normal/abnormal and true/untrue are completely independent conceptual pairs: the former describes a distribution of (in our case, literary) phenomena; the latter describes the relationship between an assertion and its object. One can say things about what is “normal” that are true – or untrue. For instance, it seems to be true that the “normal” cycle for British novelistic genres is around 25 years. And it seems to be untrue that, say, Brazilian novelistic genres function in the same way.

As for quantitative study “lending scientific legitimacy to social and cultural norms”, this is anti-scientific superstition. Aside from the fact that I have spent all my adult life trying to show how aesthetic forms are vehicles of social consent, the article in New Left Review investigates the extent and nature of (some of) those norms: why should the knowledge of how they work lend them “scientific legitimacy”? If anything, it offers arguments to criticism. Are you suggesting that ignorance serves critique better than knowledge?

Q. Couldn’t one argue, however, that your macro-social approach to literature seeks to install a new (equally subjective) literary canon? Aren’t you ultimately arguing that students of literature ought to study “normal” or “average” novels as opposed to “good” ones?

A. I am certainly arguing for the latter. But that does not entail “installing an (equally subjective) canon,” for the simple reason that a canon is a minuscule fraction of the field (one per cent, half per cent, less) – whereas I argue for the study of the entire field: the 99%, plus the 1% that we already know.

Q. So just to clarify: are you saying that inductive empirical research doesn’t necessarily make claims about what one ought to read? Are you saying that judgments about literary canons should still be based on qualitative (rather than quantitative) criteria?

A. [Yes.] Actually, I think that the disagreement here is merely terminological. The kind of criticism I am after would have an hypotethico-deductive nature, but would indeed have no normative component. In other words, it should be able to make predictions [in the sense one speaks of predictions in the historical disciplines], but will make no prescriptions about what one should or should not read.

Q. My next question has to do with semiotics and statistics. In your article, you observe how quantitative forms of analysis could help historians study thousands of texts over a period of decades or even centuries. Do you think that statistics can also be used for studying individual texts? Can words be quantified? If so, what would a quantitative model of “word reading” look like?

A. Yes, statistics has been used for the study of individual texts, or small corpora, anyway. John Burrows’ quantitative stylistics of Jane Austen’s novels is a little gem of this kind of research.

Q. Last, I was intrigued by your account of “imaginary maps” in the nineteenth century novel and was wondering whether one couldn’t trace your account through to the present. Do you think that the small town is still regarded as a “negative space” in village narratives? More specifically, how do twenty-first century models of globalism differ from nineteenth-century models?

A. Sorry, I am a nineteenth-century specialist, and have no idea how village narratives function today, because I don’t know them. The work I have done rules out idyllic self-sufficiency for developed capitalist countries, but this negative prediction is all I have to say. One thing I have learned is that hunches and hypotheses are necessary, at times wonderful mental tools – but that constructing hypotheses which you will never test, about fields you don’t know, is vacuous.

If you are interested in reading Professor Moretti’s “Graphing the Novel” article in full, you can do so at the New Left Review website. Parts II and III of his three-part study on graphs, maps, and trees will be published later this year.

Franco Moretti is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His publications include Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), and Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998).

Conversation with Richard Wolin: Derrida, Habermas, and 'Kerneuropa'

by Nader Vossoughian

In what follows, I ask for a reaction to this statement, what it means both philosophically and politically, from noted intellectual historian Richard Wolin.

Q. To what extent can the recent joint statement by Habermas and Derrida be seen as extensions of their respective philosophies? Does their statement represent a revival of the idea of the engaged intellectual -- in the tradition of Sartre, say?

A. In recent interview with Stony Brook philosopher Eduardo Mendieta, Habermas has made clear that the political rapprochement with Derrida is more of a tactical alliance than a philosophical one – which, after all, only stands to reason. Derrida’s point of departure is the later Heidegger’s “critique of reason” – reason as “logocentric,” as an “onto-theological” encumbrance. The fulcrum of Habermas’s “discourse ethics” is “discussion oriented toward mutual agreement” or “consensus.” The gap between these two conceptions remains cavernous. Nevertheless, as is well known, during the last ten years Derrida has made a laudable effort to address a wide spectrum of political questions: European unity, immigration, “justice,” tolerance, the relevance of Marxist thought, and so forth.

As far as their joint political statement against US unilateralism goes (“February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe”) – let’s not forget that this was a Habermas “initiative” (i.e., he wrote it and conceived it); Derrida co-signed but did not co-author the text.

As most people know, for almost fifty years Habermas has been the Federal Republic of Germany’s quintessential “public intellectual” – to a point where one could not write the history of postwar Germany if one failed to take his name into account. Historically speaking, the same cannot be said of Derrida. Hence, I’m wondering if his political interventions carry the same weight and force.

You raise the question of Sartre’s status as an “engaged intellectual.” Next year (2005) will be his centennial. Sartre’s influence and talents were incomparable. No one excelled in as many fields of literary and philosophical endeavor as he. Yet, for better or for worse, his reputation has been tarnished in France as a result of his many egregious political misjudgments: from his pro-Stalinist fellow-traveling during the early 1950s to his uncritical 1960s third-worldism to his astonishing claim, in a 1973 interview, that the French Revolution failed because the Jacobin dictatorship did not kill enough people! Intellectual humility is the order of the day.

Q. The policy recommendations that Derrida and Habermas make in their article – the articulation of a unified European foreign policy, greater investment in intergovernmental organizations like the UN, further promotion of international financial institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO -- sound remarkably moderate. How would you account for the fact that neither calls for more revolutionary changes? Why do they stake their hopes in the promise of a "Kerneuropa" -- a unified European Union -- rather than in the insurgent protest movements that have taken root around the world over the last three or so years? Couldn't one reproach these figures for being elitist?

A. As far as the concrete proposals found in the May 31, 2003 joint statement: Habermas, for his part, has never been a “revolutionary” but a solid social democrat and partisan of “radical reform.” Derrida’s political leanings are much more difficult to read. Frankly, I am alarmed by his denigration of “rule of law” (e.g., the claim, found in many texts, that “law” and “justice” are antipodes) and his frequent employment of arguments drawn from the political thought of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a right-wing jurist who during the 1930s enthusiastically supported the Nazis. Conversely, the Frankfurt School tradition has always supported the idea of the “rule of law” as a “magic wall” that separates “fairness” from despotic government.

In the aforementioned interview with Eduardo Mendieta, Habermas freely admits that the May 31 text has not garnered the reactions he had hoped for. The idea was that a unified Europe – bound together by a constitution and exercising a common foreign policy – could serve as a geopolitical (and moral) bulwark to offset the dangers of American unilateralism. But, unfortunately, there are many centrifugal forces at work undermining these prospects. Last month, plans for a common European constitution collapsed ignominiously on the thorny question of whether smaller nations could maintain their disproportionate political representation. France and Germany simply put down their foot.

In retrospect, many of the claims advanced in the May 31 text seem utopian. Time and again we have seen that the smaller nations are averse to being bullied by France and Germany. The February 15, 2003 pan-European protests (against the impending war in Iraq) were largely predicated on anti-Americanism. But in the future how will Europe remain unified in the absence of a common antagonist (this was the negative function the Soviet Union played during the cold war)? Let’s not forget that the Baltic nations and Poland freely supported the American campaign in Iraq because of their own histories of political oppression. Basically, they identified with the Iraqi people who, for over 25 years, had been brutally subjected to Saddam Hussein’s repressive dictatorship.

There is nothing “elitist” about the idea of multilateral world governance. Historically, since 1789, democratic claims have always been filtered through the lens of representative institutions. The more this proceeds on a global scale (via international treaties and institutions such as the Hague-based International Criminal Court), the better.

Q. In your view, has Derrida's thinking attempted to become more accountable, socially and politically speaking, since the early 1990s (when, as you put it, Derrida “…deconstruct[ed] into nonexistence the gravity of Heidegger's Nazism” and defended Paul de Man against charges of anti-Semitism)?

A. I think you’re right to suggest that Derrida’s sensitivity to political questions has increased since the Heidegger and de Man affairs, which unquestionably represented deconstruction’s darkest hour. But, as I mentioned before with reference to Derrida’s reliance on Carl Schmitt, there are aspects of deconstruction that are very difficult to square with the demands of democratic politics. In a nutshell: from Heidegger (and, more recently, via Schmitt) Derrida has inherited a fundamental cynicism about “reason” and “norms.” Heidegger once observed that “reason is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought”! And Schmitt famously remarked that “whoever says ‘humanity’ lies” (this was his way of dismissing the claims of human rights and international law). So, in my view, there’s a fundamental rift between Derrida’s metatheory (deconstruction) and his new found allegiance to political democracy. To be meaningful and effective, democracy must be predicated on rule of law, deliberative decision-making, proceduralism, and a fundamental respect for what John Rawls called the norms of “public reason.” Derrida has more or less predicated his career as a philosopher on vigorously opposing these incorrigibly “logocentric” ideals and norms. Hence, whether he can get to where he wants to go politically on the basis of his “anti-epistemology” or “hermeneutics of suspicion” (I mean these as euphemisms for “so-called deconstruction”) is dubious.

To read an abbreviated version of the Derrda/Habermas statement in the original German, visit the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung website.

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (1991), Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (1996), Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (2003), and The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (forthcoming spring 2004).