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For a Justice to Come: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

by Lieven De Cauter (interviewer), Ortwin de Graef (translator), and Maïwenn Furic (transcriber)

In 1997, conservative commentator and journalist William Kristol formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank whose stated goal is the bolstering of American “military strength and moral clarity” in the global arena. THE PNAC's most prominent exponents include US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, and vice president Dick Cheney. It is credited with spawning the ideology of pre-emption, the unilateral foreign policy approach that George W. Bush adopted in the wake of September 11th.

In the interview that follows, Lieven De Cauter explores with Jacques Derrida the dangerous precedents set by the PNAC. He also introduces the policy goals of the BRussells Tribunal, which convened for the first time last weekend to discuss possible war crimes committed by the Bush administration since the outbreak of the war in Iraq.

Lieven De Cauter: While thanking you for your generosity—why have you decided to grant us this interview on our initiative, the “BRussels Tribunal”?

Jacques Derrida: First of all, I wanted to salute your initiative in its principle: to resuscitate the tradition of a Russell Tribunal is symbolically an important and necessary thing to do today. I believe that, in its principle, it is a good thing for the world, even if only in that it feeds the geopolitical reflection of all citizens of the world. I am even more convinced of this necessity in light of the fact that, for a number of years now, we have witnessed an increased interest in the working, in the constitution of international institutions, institutions of international law which, beyond the sovereignty of States, judge heads of State, generals. Not yet States as such, precisely, but persons responsible for, or suspected of being responsible for, war crimes, crimes against humanity—one could mention the case of Pinochet, despite its ambiguity, or of Milosevic. At any rate, heads of State have to appear as such before an International Criminal Court, for instance, which has a recognized status in international law, despite all the difficulties you know: the American, French, Israeli reservations. Nonetheless, this tribunal exists, and even if it is still faltering, weak and problematic in the execution of its sanctions, it exists as a recognized phenomenon of international law.

Your project, if I understand it correctly, is not of the same type, even if it is inspired by the same spirit. It does not have a juridical or judicial status recognized by any State, and it consequently remains a private initiative. Citizens of different countries have agreed among each other to conduct, as honestly as possible, an inquiry into a policy, into a political project and its execution. The point is not to reach a verdict resulting in sanctions but to raise or to sharpen the vigilance of the citizens of the world, in the first place that of the responsible parties you propose to judge. That can have an exemplary symbolic weight.

That is why, even though I do not feel involved in the actual experience you intend to set up, I think it is very important to underscore that the case you are about to examine—which is evidently a massive and extremely serious case—is only one case among many. In the logic of your project, other policies, other political or military staff, other countries, other statesmen can also be brought to be judged in the same manner, or to be associated with this case. Personally, I have a critical attitude towards the Bush administration and its project, its attack on Iraq, and the conditions in which this has come about in a unilateral fashion, in spite of official protestations from European countries including France, in violation of the rules of the United Nations and the Security Council... But notwithstanding this criticism — which I have expressed in public, by the way — I would not wish for the United States in general to have to appear before such a tribunal. I would want to distinguish a number of forces within the United States that have opposed the policy on Iraq as firmly as in Europe. This policy does not involve the American people in general, nor even the American State, but a phase in American politics which, for that matter, is about to be questioned again in the run-up to the presidential elections. Perhaps there will be a change, at least partially, in the United States itself, so I would encourage you to be prudent as regards the target of the accusation.

LDC: That is why we have directed our attention not to the government in general but more particularly to the Project for the New American Century, the think tank which has issued all these extreme ideas of unilateralism, hegemony, militarization of the world, etc.

JD: Where there is an explicit political project which declares its hegemonic intent and proposes to put everything into place to accomplish this, there one can, in effect, level accusations, protest in the name of international law and existing institutions, in their spirit and in their letter. I am thinking as much of the United Nations as of the Security Council, which are respectable institutions, but whose structure, charter, procedures need to be reformed, especially the Security Council. The crisis that has been unfolding confirms this: these international institutions really need to be reformed. And here I would naturally plead for a radical transformation — I don’t know whether this will come about in the short-run — which would call into question even the Charter, that is to say, the respect for the sovereignties of the nation-states and the non-divisibility of sovereignties. There is a contradiction between the respect for human rights in general, also part of the Charter, and the respect for the sovereignty of the nation-state. The States are in effect represented as States in the United Nations and a fortiori in the Security Council, which gathers together the victors of the last war. All this calls for a profound transformation. I would insist that it should be a transformation and not a destruction, for I believe in the spirit of the United Nations.

LDC: So you still remain within the vision of Kant…

JD: At least in the spirit of Kant, for I also have some questions concerning the Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism.1 It is in this perspective that I believe initiatives such as yours (or analogous initiatives) are symbolically very important to raise consciousness about these necessary transformations. This will have — at least that is what I hope — the symbolic value of a call to reflection we are in need of, and which the States are not taking care of, which not even institutions like the International Criminal Court are taking care of.

LDC: If I may allow myself one specification: we are part of a whole network called “World Tribunal on Iraq”. There will be sessions in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Mexico, New York, London, and Istanbul. In London, and there the link between the International Criminal Court and the moral tribunal is very strong, those in charge of the Tribunal on Iraq have, together with specialists, assembled a dossier to investigate whether Blair (who has recognized the International Criminal Court) has broken international law. By all evidence, there is a considerable consensus among specialists to say that this war is a transgression, it is an “aggressive war” in the technical sense of the term as used in the charter of the UN, since there was no imminent threat to the territory of the countries involved. The upshot of this inquiry is that they have submitted a dossier to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Similarly in Copenhagen, since Denmark is part of the coalition. So it’s possible that our moral initiative may be transformed, in some of its components, into a juridical procedure strictly speaking.

JD: That would be desirable, evidently! But the probability that this would come about seems low, for there would be too many States who would oppose your initiative becoming institutional and generally judicial, and not just the United States. Yet if this doesn’t come about, that does not mean your project is destined to ineffectiveness. On the contrary. I believe in its considerable symbolic effectiveness in the public domain. The fact that it is said, published, even if it isn’t followed by a judgment in the strictly judicial sense, let alone actual sanctions, can have considerable symbolical impact on the political consciousness of the citizens, a relayed, deferred effect, but one that raises high expectations. I would hope that you would treat those you accuse justly, that yours would be an undertaking of true integrity, devoid of preliminary positioning, without preconditions, that everything would be done in serenity and justice, that the responsible parties would be accurately identified, that you would not go over the top and that you would not exclude other procedures of the same type in the future. I would not want this procedure to serve as an excuse for not conducting other procedures that are just as necessary concerning other countries, other policies, whether they be European or not. I would even wish that the exemplary character of your initiative would lead to a lasting, if not a permanent instance.

I believe that it would be perceived as being more just if you didn’t commit yourself to this target as if it were the only possible target, notably because, as you are aware, in this aggression against Iraq, American responsibility was naturally decisive but it didn’t come about without complex complicities from many other quarters. We are dealing with a knot of nearly inextricable co-responsibilities. I would hope that this would be clearly taken into account and that it wouldn’t be the accusation of one man only. Even if he is an ideologue, someone who has given the hegemony project a particularly readable form, he has not done it on his own, he cannot have imposed it on non-consenting people. So the contours of the accused, of the suspect or the suspects, are very hard to determine.

LDC: Yes, that is one of the reasons why we have abandoned the strictly juridical format. One of the disadvantages of the juridical format is that you can only target persons. Whereas we want to take aim at a system, a systemic logic. We name the accused (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld) to show people we’re not talking about phantoms, but we take aim at the PNAC as a set of performative discourses, that is to say plans to achieve something, intentions to be translated into action. Our difficulty is also one of communication: communicating to people that PNAC exists and that it is important to spread this knowledge, is already a job in itself.

JD: Of course. And for that reason, it is important that matters are partly personalized and partly developed at the level of the system, of the principles, the concept, where this system, these principles, these concepts violate international laws which must be both respected and perhaps also changed. This is where you will not be able to avoid talking about sovereignty, about the crisis of sovereignty, about the necessary division or delimitation of sovereignty. Personally, when I have to take a position on this vast issue of sovereignty, of what I call its necessary deconstruction, I am very cautious. I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty. It’s an enormous philosophical task, requiring the re-reading of everything, from Kant to Bodin, from Hobbes to Schmitt. But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

In the present case, we have precisely the convergence of the arrogant and hegemonic assertion of a sovereign Nation-State with a gathering of global economic forces, involving all kinds of transactions and complications in which China, Russia and many countries of the Middle East are equally mixed up. This is where matters become very hard to disentangle. I believe that sometimes the reclamation of sovereignty should not necessarily be denounced or criticized, it depends on the situation.

LDC: As you have clearly demonstrated in Voyous [Rogues], in deconstructing the term, there is no democracy without “cracy”: a certain power, and even force, is required.

JD: Absolutely. You can also talk of the sovereignty of the citizen, who votes in a sovereign fashion, so you need to be very cautious. In my view, the interesting thing about your project is in taking up or pursuing this reflection starting from an actual case which takes a specific form: military, strategic, economic, etc. It is very important to develop such reflection on a case, but this reflection requires considerable time and must accompany the entire geopolitical process in decades to come. It is not just as a Frenchman, European or citizen of the world but also as a philosopher concerned to see these questions developed that I find your attempt interesting and necessary. It will provide an opportunity for others, many others I hope, to adopt a position with regard to your efforts, to reflect, possibly to oppose you, or to join you, but this can only be beneficial for the political reflection we are in need of.

LDC: I was amazed by the definition you give in The Concept of September 11: a philosopher, you say, is someone who deals with this transition towards political and international institutions to come. That is a very political definition of the philosopher.

JD: What I wanted to convey is that it won’t necessarily be the professional philosophers who will deal with this. The lawyer or the politician who takes charge of these questions will be the philosopher of tomorrow. Sometimes, politicians or lawyers are more able to philosophically think these questions through than professional academic philosophers, even though there are a few within the University dealing with this. At any rate, philosophy today, or the duty of philosophy, is to think this in action, by doing something.

LDC: I would like to return to this notion of sovereignty. Is not the New Imperial Order which names “Rogue States” a State of exception? You speak in Voyous about the concept of the auto-immunity of democracy: democracy, at certain critical moments, believes it must suspend itself to defend democracy. This is what is happening in the United States now, both in its domestic policy and in its foreign policy. The ideology of the PNAC, and therefore of the Bush administration, is exactly that.

JD: The exception is the translation, the criterion of sovereignty, as was noted by Carl Schmitt (whom I have also criticized, one must be very cautious when one talks about Carl Schmitt, I have written some chapters on Carl Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship where I take him seriously and where I criticize him and I would not want my reflection on Schmitt to be seen as an endorsement of either his theses or his history). Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Exception and sovereignty go hand in hand here. In the same way that democracy, at times, threatens or suspends itself, so sovereignty consists in giving oneself the right to suspend the law. That is the definition of the sovereign: he makes the law, he is above the law, he can suspend the law. That is what the United States has done, on the one hand when they trespassed against their own commitments with regard to the UN and the Security Council, and on the other hand, within the country itself, by threatening American democracy to a certain extent, that is to say by introducing exceptional police and judicial procedures. I am not only thinking of the Guantanamo prisoners but also of the Patriot Act: from its introduction, the FBI has carried out inquisitorial procedures of intimidation which have been denounced by the Americans themselves, notably by lawyers, as being in breach of the Constitution and of democracy.

Having said that, to be fair, we must recall that the United States is after all a democracy. Bush, who was elected with the narrowest of margins, risks losing the next elections: he is only sovereign for four years. It is a very legalistic country rich in displays of political liberty which would not be tolerated in a good many other countries. I am not only thinking of countries known to be non-democratic but also of our own Western European democracies. In the United States, when I saw those massive marches against the imminent war in Iraq, in front of the White House, right by Bush’s offices, I said to myself that if in France protesters assembled in their thousands and marched in front of the Elysée in a similar situation, that would not be tolerated. To be fair, we must take into account this contradiction within American democracy — on the one hand, auto-immunity: democracy destroys itself in protecting itself; but on the other hand, we must take into account the fact that this hegemonic tendency is also a crisis of hegemony. The United States, to my mind, convulses upon its hegemony at a time when it is in crisis, precarious. There is no contradiction between the hegemonic drive and crisis. The United States realizes all too well that within the next few years, both China and Russia will have begun to weigh in. The oil stories which have naturally determined the Iraq episode are linked to long-term forecasts notably concerning China: China’s oil supply, control over oil in the Middle East… all of this indicates that hegemony is as much under threat as it is manifest and arrogant.

It is an extremely complex situation, which is why I am bound to say it should not be a matter of blanket accusations or denunciations leveled against the United States, but that we should take stock of all that is critical in American political life. There are forces in the United States that fight the Bush administration, alliances should be formed with these forces, their existence recognized. At times they express their criticism in ways much more radical than in Europe. But there is evidently — and I suppose you will discuss this in your commission of inquiry —the enormous problem of the media, of control of the media, of the media power which has accompanied this entire history in a decisive manner, from September 11 to the invasion of Iraq, an invasion which, by the way, in my opinion was already scheduled well before September 11.

LDC: Yes, as a matter of fact that is one of the things that need to be proven. The PNAC, in 2000, writes: “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” They write this in September 2000: it was already decided, all the rest was just an alibi.

JD: I have had this debate in public with Baudrillard, who said that the aggression against Iraq — which was then being prepared— was a direct consequence of September 11. I opposed that thesis, I said that I thought it would take place anyway, that the premises had been in place for a long time already, and that the two sequences can be dissociated, to a certain extent. The day when this history will be written, when the documents are made public, it will become clear that September 11 was preceded by highly complicated, underhanded negotiations, often in Europe, on the subject of petrol pipeline passage, at a time when the petrol clan was in power. There were intrigues and threats, and it is not impossible to think that one day it will be discovered that it was really the Bush clan that was targeted rather than the country, the America of Clinton. But we shouldn’t stop at petrol: there are numerous other strategic geopolitical stakes, among them the tensions with China, Europe, Russia. Alliances with the United States, variable as ever, since it has attacked those whom they have supported for a very long time. Iraq was an ally of the United States as of France: all of this is part of diplomatic inconstancy, hypocritical from end to end, and not only on the part of the United States. There are many more stakes than petrol alone, especially since petrol is a matter of only a few more decades: there won’t be any oil left in 50 years! We must take the petrol question into account, but we shouldn’t devote all our attention and analysis to it. There are military questions, passing through territorial questions of occupation and control. But military power is not only a territorial power, we know that now, it also passes through non-territorialized controls, techno-communicational channels etc. All of this has to be taken into account.

LDC: And Israel?

JD: Many have said that the American-Israeli alliance or the support the United States give to Israel is not unrelated to this intervention in Iraq. I believe this is true to some extent. But here too matters are very complicated, because even if the current Israeli government—and here I would take the same precautions as for the United States: there are Israelis in Israel who fight Sharon — has indeed congratulated itself officially and in public on the aggression against Iraq, the freedom this may have apparently given Israel in its offensive initiatives of colonization and repression is very ambiguous. Here too we could speak of auto-immunity: it’s very contradictory, because at the same time this has aggravated Palestinian terrorism, intensified or reawakened symptoms of anti-Semitism across Europe…

It’s very complicated, for if it is true that the Americans support Israel — just like the majority of European countries, with different political modulations - the best American allies of Sharon’s policy, that is to say the most offensive policy of all Israeli governments, are not only the American Jewish community but also the Christian fundamentalists. These are often the most pro-Israeli of all Americans, at times even more so than certain American Jews. I’m not sure it will turn out to have been in Israel’s best interest that this form of aggression against Iraq has come about. The future will tell. Even Sharon meets with opposition in his own government nowadays, in his own majority, because he claims to withdraw from the Gaza colonies. The difficulty of a project such as yours, however just and magnificent it may be in its principle, is that it must cautiously take this complexity into account, that it must try not to be unfair to any of the parties. That is one of the reasons why I insist in confirming my solidarity in principle. Unable to participate effectively in the inquiry and in the development of the judgment because of my illness, I prefer to restrict myself for now to this agreement in principle, but I will not hesitate to applaud you afterwards, if I find you have conducted matters well!

LDC: Your statements are limpid and will serve as drink for many who are thirsty (for justice, for instance). Thank you very much. By way of post-script: let us speak of messianism for a minute or so. That is to say of “the weak force”, which refers to Benjamin and which you evoke in the “Prière d’insérer”, the preface to Voyous. Allow me to quote from it: “This vulnerable force, this force without power exposes to what or who is coming, and coming to affect it (…) What affirms itself here would be a messianic act of faith—irreligious and without messianism. (…) This site is neither soil nor foundation. It is nonetheless there that the call for a thought of the event to come will take root: of democracy to come, of reason to come. All hopes will put their trust in this call, certainly, but the call will remain, in itself, without hope. Not desperate but alien to teleology, to the expectancy and the benefit [salut] of salvation. Not alien to the salavation [salut] of the other, nor alien to the farewell or to justice, but still rebellious towards the economy of redemption.”… I thought this very beautiful. Almost a prayer to insert — into the everyday, into our project. What is it, this messianism without religion?

JD: The weak force indeed refers to the interpretation of Benjamin, but it is not exactly mine. It is what I call “messianicity without messianism”: I would say that today, one of the incarnations, one of the implementations of this messianicity, of this messianism without religion, may be found in the alter-globalization movements. Movements that are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed, full of contradictions, but that gather together the weak of the earth, all those who feel themselves crushed by the economic hegemonies, by the liberal market, by sovereignism, etc. I believe it is these weak who will prove to be strongest in the end and who represent the future. Even though I am not a militant involved in these movements, I place my bet on the weak force of those alter-globalization movements, who will have to explain themselves, to unravel their contradictions, but who march against all the hegemonic organizations of the world. Not just the United States, also the International Monetary Fund, the G8, all those organized hegemonies of the rich countries, the strong and powerful countries, of which Europe is part. It is these alter-globalization movements that offer one of the best figures of what I would call messianicity without messianism, that is to say a messianicity that does not belong to any determined religion. The conflict with Iraq involved numerous religious elements, from all sides—from the Christian side as well as from the Muslim side. What I call messianicity without messianism is a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to say universal. A promise independent of the three religions when they oppose each other, since in fact it is a war between three Abrahamic religions. A promise beyond the Abrahamic religions, universal, without relation to revelations or to the history of religions. My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialized nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West. (In spite of everything, Europe, France especially, but also the United States are secular in principle in their Constiutions. I recently heard a journalist say to an American: “how do you explain that Bush always says ‘God bless America’, that the President swears on the Bible, etc.” and the American replied: “don’t lecture us on secularity for we put the separation of Church and State into our Constitution long before you did”, that the State was not under the control of any religion whatsoever, which does not stop Christian domination from exerting itself, but there too it is imperative to be very cautious). Messianicity without messianism, that is: independence in respect of religion in general. A faith without religion in some sort.

Editor's note: We wish to thank Lieven De Cauter and the BRussells Tribunal for generously allowing us permission to reprint this interview. Copies of it can also be found at the website of the Al-Ahram Weekly. It originally appeared in the March 18, 2004 issue of De Standaard Letteren.

Jacques Derrida is Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is also Global Distinguished Professor of English, French, and German at New York University.

Lieven De Cauter teaches the philosophy of culture at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has authored several books and is initiator of the BRussells Tribunal on PNAC and the New Imperial World Order.

Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko: Making Critical Public Space

By Elise S. Youn and María J. Prieto

The projects of public artist Krzysztof Wodiczko give participants the opportunity to speak about their traumatic experiences. Through the animation of historic public buildings and monuments in cities such as Krakow, Boston, Hiroshima, Tijuana, St. Louis and Barcelona, his video projections create spaces for individual therapy and public reflection. In the conversation that follows, Wodiczko discusses his process of testing ideas and expressions (as speech-acts) in order to initiate a critical dialogue both within a specific marginalized culture, as well as with the greater community. In a concluding discussion about September 11th, Wodiczko also extends this critical consciousness to other fields, emphasizing the active role of architecture in questioning and engaging society.

Stills from Wodiczko's Tijuana Projection (2001) (right) and Hiroshima Projection (2001) (below, right) are featured here courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong of New York.

Q: How do different theories of democracy affect your work, and specifically, how do your projects interpret Chantal Mouffe’s idea of the agonistic democracy, in which all members of society have an equal voice?

KW: In the process of doing my own work, I obviously reflect on the theories of Mouffe and others, or at the very least, they help me understand aspects of what I am dealing with. The paradox is that I do not learn from theory what to do, but at the same time, I do not stay away from it. This is because theorists and artists work simultaneously with similar issues.

That said, I think that the many fragments of theory concerning public space, democracy and public art are not necessarily all connected in one unified theory. Through my work, I can see these connections, but they are not systematically organized in my head because I am not a theorist.

When you refer to Chantal Mouffe, yes, I am extremely open to and inspired by some of the things she has said. But there are also many things to which she does not and cannot refer, because she is a theorist rather than a practitioner. Her approach belongs to the domain of political theory, or more specifically, to the theory of democracy. There could also be, I suppose, an ethical-political, as well as a psycho-political approach to democratic theory, although neither one is her primary focus.

I believe that the democratic process and public space cannot even for a moment be created if we do not include all potential speakers and actors in the discourse. We must be inclusive towards the participants – those who are perhaps the most important for agonistic discourse, but who are incapable of contributing to it. Their ability to speak and share their “passions” is incapacitated by the very experiences that they should be communicating. Before they can add their voice to the democratic agon, these actors must again develop their shattered abilities to communicate. They must do so for the sake of their own health and for the health of democracy. The process of unlocking their post-traumatic silence requires not only critical, but also clinical, approaches and attention. Thus, I must risk here injecting (even into Mouffe’s own theory) other concepts and ideas.

In my practical, artistic mind, I try to infuse (hopefully not confuse) the concepts of the agonistic democracy with ethical-political concepts from Foucault and psycho-political ideas from Judith Herman, a trauma theorist and therapist. Calls for “dissensus,” disagreement, passion and an inclusive adversarial discourse that acknowledges and exposes social exclusions (Mouffe) must be injected with a call for an ethics of the self and the Other in “fearless speaking” (Foucault). This would be combined with a call for psychotherapeutic recovery through “reconnection” that emphasizes the role of public truth-telling and testimony (Herman).

When you move into artistic practice, it is all about responding to what each project demands and then going further. In a sense, it is not about making or following theory; it is about creating a continuing practical work that asks new theoretical questions – a certain constellation of questions which may not have necessarily been brought together yet by philosophers and theorists.

Q: In the post-World War II “societies of control” described by Deleuze, power is said to exert itself internally rather than overtly, making it difficult to counter the deluge of information. We are relentlessly bombarded by media and images, so that it seems like the only way to engage people, or to raise awareness, is to shock people. Your strategy seems to involve using large-scale monuments and projections as a means of making a meaningful impact. How does your work intend to provoke people to think critically in this kind of society, to dialogue with each other, or to find solutions to what they are reflecting on? We are referring not only to the process of the psychological awakening, but also to the more practical notions of building a community or inciting people towards more direct action.

KW: Those who are speaking in and through my work are at the same time helping themselves move from private confession, through critical public testimony, and into action. Through this process, they begin to understand that what they have to say will change something. The very fact that they are speaking of something of which no one else wants to speak, and that they are using the authority and the phenomenological power of the architectural body, allows them to refer to the historical significance of these monuments as silent witnesses to previous and present events. The participants make a link between their present life and past events, hoping that these events will not repeat themselves in the future; they end up activating the concept of monitus, which means “warning”. They actualize monuments (monumentus), and they also become living memorials themselves, in the sense of moneo, or remembering. They testify and protest (from testis, “witness”). The testimonial is submerged in the life of the city, so there is a new and powerful presence of someone that both denounces and announces something, in an organic connection to a symbolic structure of some importance.

It becomes clear that if those people can say something, if the monument can speak, then perhaps the public in turn can also do something. There is some possibility of spreading the contagious process of unnerving, irritating, and interrupting the passivity and total silence of the city.

The silence of the city is the speech of the city, but no one hears that speech. Thus, the participants speak of that silence, while also questioning it. They themselves use it, some more than others, as a vehicle to reconnect with society, since they – during the long process of recording, rerecording, editing, and actually putting words to unspeakable experiences – use it as a therapeutic vehicle. Because they must also be animators of a monument, they create a comical and strange aspect for it, like a new dramatic therapy. The participants need a certain distance from themselves because they each become monuments and buildings. They see others in the same situation; they are not alone. They are unique, but also part of a larger picture.

This is a process of “reconnection” that artists, or an art of the animation of the monument, can provide.

There are other ways and techniques of reconnection that occur through therapy and in cultural work. One instrumental factor is that the projection is not only practiced and prerecorded over a long period of time, which is very important, but that it also has a live component: real time. In real time, there is the possibility of feedback, meaning that the public (whoever chooses to do so) might have the chance to speak back to the building through the projected person animating that building. That is what I am trying to test today. In the Tijuana Projection (2001), the speakers were able to add life – speech – once they realized that people were listening and looking at their faces and façades seriously. They put on the instruments and told the truth in open and “fearless” speech. They were able to face the listeners directly, and the listeners were also able to face them – both the actual faces of speakers, and the façade of the monument.

Today, in my projects for St. Louis and Barcelona, I am thinking about using a microphone so that when a person speaks back to the huge body of the building, the person animating the building or monument will be able to see the listeners through some kind of wireless or wired feedback transmission. An argument might therefore be able to take place, a wrestling with the monument.

Q: In your writings, you have referred to the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, revisited by Foucault. Parrhesia is the idea of having a responsibility to tell the truth, to confess. You use this concept in your work to encourage those who have been traumatized to speak fearlessly. You have also talked about the importance of “fearless listeners” among those who do not necessarily have the obligation to speak, but who provide the forum within which dialogue can take place. In your experience, when a dialogue is established, is there something greater that gets created?

KW: Since all of the projections have been through monuments, in the context of cultural or art events, there is always something greater there. Even if it is not such a big event, anything that brings people to a monument will be recorded by the media, because somehow television, the press, the radio, and the internet cannot live without these historic, monumental public places. As long as there are a number of people outside looking at a monument, creating a spectacle, the media will be there, guaranteed. This means that maybe I can also use the presence of the media event as an opportunity.

Q: Jacques Rancière says that dissensus or disagreement in public assemblages is important for collaboration and dialogue to occur. He says that by appealing to a shared sensation or emotion, society can succeed at being both united and divided. In a similar way, it seems that your projects support both collaborative unity and social diversity with the intention of creating a new kind of critical public. We also know that you have previously drawn inspiration from Habermas’ notion of consensus, as well as from Mouffe’s theories of dissensus and agonism. So it seems like all of these concepts have at some point influenced your work.

KW: Yes, I am very interested in all of these concepts, although coming from Poland, a country that suffered from an authoritarian and Catholic pedagogy, I still don’t know how to deal with one concept which you have not mentioned - the idea of “conversion.” Chantal Mouffe took the idea from Kuhn, looking to the possibility of “conversion” rather than compromise as the result of agonistic discourse. At some point, she suggests, the adversary accepts a different kind of framework of understanding, rather than finding a middle-ground solution (the word “solution” in fact suggests dissolving discourse, as if democracy were a solvent for difference). Nevertheless, I think conversion can indeed happen. I can create the conditions for it, but I do not think it is possible for me to guarantee that my work will reach that point.

Q: What exactly do you mean by accepting a new framework?

KW: Accepting a new framework means that you suddenly realize that you are gaining access to a reality that has its own life. Part of this reality is that there are initial positions there, from the rest of the world. But in accepting a new framework you might suddenly start to see the world from the point of view of the Other. This is perhaps what Benjamin was hoping for, seeing the world through the experience and tradition of the vanquished, rather than through the history of the victors. Maybe it would be too simple now to think like Benjamin, but it is an interesting idea to see the city from the point of view of the wound, from the point of view of the real trouble, rather than looking at the trouble from above. One hopes this kind of conversion is possible, although it may be a stretch.

Q: John Rajchman defines Pragmatism as trusting in the world while also being critical of it, realizing that the truth is in the world. Bruno Latour, meanwhile, uses the concept of “things in the making,” or things in process – something to think about or to use as criticism – to describe the concept of Pragmatism. Do you see your work as connecting with any of these ideas?

KW: I think that the process of constructing a story or testimony, through the entire procedure of recording, rerecording and editing linked to the projections I do now, is definitely something beyond what participants can usually hope for – as long as there are no preconceptions. I do not want to know what a projection is about before it is over. Even afterwards, I may still not want to know what it is about, and would rather leave it in the hands and minds of the people who stay behind. At the same time, I have to take responsibility for my work. I don’t know if this connects with Pragmatist theories, but for me my work is a way of creating a “transitional” phenomenon and a kind of “potential space,” the “third zone” of which D. W. Winnicott speaks in his work on the “transitional object.” I consider this approach a very important step, quite beyond the Modernist approach, to protect the process, so that people start playing with and discovering why they entered the process in the first place. This is a more creative way of thinking about art, one in which the participants become artists themselves through use. And at that moment, the questions of who the artist is here – they or I – or whether the participants received this project from the outside world or created it themselves, need not even be formulated. Now, to what degree this psychological idea of development, “things in the making,” or the process of creating a situation for things to make themselves, or to “become,” fits Pragmatism, you are in a better position to answer than I.

Q: We see a real connection between your work and Pragmatism. For instance, you have said that when you start working on a project, you want to test it, even for as long as a year, to see how it can work in the most effective way.

KW: In these projects, it is really the participants who are doing the testing. What I am trying to say is that the participants are co-artists who test the degree to which the projects can be useful for them, and how they can further be useful for others. They use the project for themselves: they are both doctors and patients, which is the nature of the clinic. It is a kind of public clinic, all of this. Here we move into another link between the critical and the clinical, the proposition of Deleuze. This is a very elegant relationship in which the clinical can be critical in the sense that it detects and investigates symptoms. In the case of my work, the analogy might go even further, from the diagnosis to the actual healing. It could be that in my projects, as the participant-speakers examine the ill social body through their own problems, they may also want to change things.

It is interesting that Pragmatism is being reactualized here. I am not seeking to revisit it, but perhaps to look at it in a new way.

Q: Your work seems to be about locating philosophy as a practical and critical method of acting and experiencing. It is always about discussing the individual as a self-critic, with his or her thoughts and actions, and trying to make public spaces that engage this process.

KW: The approach you are referring to is more of an artistic rather than an aesthetic one, if I were to use that distinction from Nietzsche, because it is the doing, the making, and the announcing of something that is the vision. For artists, it is very significant to understand that there is much hope in art, in such a framework of thinking. It is not just about depiction or representation, but about passion, action, intervention and transformation – this is what art can do. It is good for the discussion of public art to recognize this idea of hope.

Q: Do you think this same kind of critical consciousness applies to architecture today as well – despite the current direction of architecture towards a reliance on the image, on designing with the computer, and on the absence of social responsibility on the part of the architect?

KW: Yes, today there seems to be too much of an emphasis on translating theoretical ideas into architectural forms as if they were sculptures. This kind of formal architecture is not about creating a situation for people to discover something new about themselves, nor is it about transforming the world around them or their own inner worlds. This is the connection I see among Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object, phenomena in design and architecture, and the Pragmatist tradition you are focusing on. The questions, “What is architecture?” and “What is design?” become newly formulated; they are no longer old questions. It has been a long time since I heard these discussions, but for example, fifteen years ago, everyone was interested in the idea of “nomadic” architecture. But the architecture did not move, nor did anyone really move thanks to that architecture, which was more a picture or sculpture of a movement.

This kind of questioning even gave rise to the idea of “nomadology,” written up during the late 1970s. Nomadology was part of a major psychoanalytical and political metaphor – a major critique of form – and an understanding of form and life as something very complex. And here it was being translated into buildings that were somewhat grotesque attempts to show themselves to be moving, repeating themselves in various places, or spreading. However, what these buildings actually did was barricade the space, contributing to the production of striated space against smooth space, and discouraging the possibility for people to somehow move through the striated space as if it were smooth. (The only exception to this was Lucien Kroll, with his “architecture of complexity.”)

It is important to preserve all of these crossings, to somehow create an alternative way for people to relate and communicate to each other – to move on with their daily lives. We have come to realize that these “new” structures were actually reproducing old ways in new forms.

Q: How do you feel about the symbolic content of this sort of formalist architecture, especially about the way an arbitrary form can be used to symbolize the collective, for example in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan with the Twin Towers competition?

KW: This kind of architecture is a replacement – a substitute for many discourses that did not occur. As a “memorial” project, it could be seen as exemplifying the danger of closure, pre-empting the possibility of undergoing real mourning and preserving melancholia. If mourning is the process of thinking and of working through something – analytically reconstructing all of the conditions that fueled such a merciless, bloody act – all of this work is not being done. Instead, we are creating the conditions for sorrow, for a sense of loss, and for commemoration; but this is not really the conscious work of memory that is required.

In general, I think that closure in any memorial that does not invite us to do anything, but instead does something for us – or has already done something for us, completed our work, so to speak – is extremely dangerous, especially in our age, because the history of memorials is the history of the machines that only help bad things happen again.

Now, if a memorial could do something, it should probably create the conditions for the engagement of younger people, for new generations to deal with what has happened – or what is still happening – so that the same tragedy does not occur again. This is one issue, but the memorial of course still needs to gather people together and commemorate the event. I am not saying that one program should replace the other, but the complexity of the discourse around the question of how to commemorate is not there in the case of the rebuilding after September 11th. There were beginnings of all sorts of discussions, but somehow the architecture abruptly arrived and proposed something else instead: it became the substitute for the “working-through” process of mourning. This is not only a problem with September 11th and the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan; it is happening in other places as well. So the question becomes: if not this, what could a memorial architecture be instead?

Krzysztof Wodiczko is Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies as well as head of the Interrogative Design Group at MIT. He has developed a series of public intervention and speech-act equipment, such as Homeless Vehicle (1988-1989), Alien Staff (1992), and Dis-Armor (1999-2000), as well as created over seventy projections on public buildings and monuments around the world.