Philosophy in a Time of Terror

Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

Giovanna Borradori

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226066653
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome their mutual antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work.

1

FUNDAMENTALISM AND TERROR

A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas

BORRADORI: Do you consider what we now tend to call “September 11” an unprecedented event, one that radically alters the way we see ourselves?

HABERMAS: Allow me to say in advance that I shall be answering your questions at a distance of three months.¹ Therefore, it might be useful to mention my personal experience in relation to the event. At the start of October I was beginning a two-month stay in Manhattan. I must confess I somehow felt more of a stranger this time than I did on previous visits to the “capital of the twentieth century,” a city that has fascinated me for more than three decades. It was not only the flag-waving and rather defiant “United We Stand” patriotism that had changed the climate, nor was it the peculiar demand for solidarity and the accompanying susceptibility to any presumed “anti-Americanism.” The impressive American liberality toward foreigners, the charm of the eager, sometimes also self-consciously accepting embrace—this noble openhearted mentality seemed to have given way to a slight mistrust. Would we, the ones who had not been present, now also stand by them unconditionally? Even those who hold an unquestionable record, as I do among my American friends, needed to be cautious with regard to criticism. Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans (or among Israelis).

On the other hand, only there did I first feel the full magnitude of the event. The terror of this disaster, which literally came bursting out of the blue, the horrible convictions behind this treacherous assault, as well as the stifling depression that set over the city, were a completely different experience there than at home. Every friend and colleague could remember exactly what they were doing that day shortly after 9:00 A. M. In short, only there did I begin to better comprehend the foreboding atmosphere that already echoes in your question. Also among the left there is a widespread awareness of living at a turning point in history. I do not know whether the U.S. government itself was slightly paranoid or merely shunning responsibility. At any rate, the repeated and utterly nonspecific announcements of possible new terror attacks and the senseless calls to “be alert” further stirred a vague feeling of angst along with an uncertain readiness—precisely the intention of the terrorists. In New York people seemed ready for the worst. As a matter of course, the anthrax scares (even the plane crash in Queens)² were attributed to Osama bin Laden’s diabolical machinations.

Given this background, you can understand a certain tendency toward skepticism. But is what we contemporaries think at the moment that important for a long-term diagnosis? If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, as many think, then it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact. For that matter, the comparison is not to be drawn with Pearl Harbor but rather with the aftermath of August 1914. The outbreak of World War I signaled the end of a peaceful and, in retrospect, somewhat unsuspecting era, unleashing an age of warfare, totalitarian oppression, mechanistic barbarism and bureaucratic mass murder. At the time, there was something like a widespread foreboding. Only in retrospect will we be able to understand if the symbolically suffused collapse of the capitalistic citadels in lower Manhattan implies a break of that type or if this catastrophe merely confirms, in an inhuman and dramatic way, a long-known vulnerability of our complex civilization. If an event is not as unambiguously important as the French Revolution once was—not long after that event Kant had spoken about a “historical sign” that pointed toward a “moral tendency of humankind”—only “effective history” can adjudicate its magnitude in retrospect.

Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios depicted today will actually hold in the future. The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might, in the most favorable case, be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order. At all events, a hopeful signal was the Afghanistan conference in Bonn, which, under the auspices of the UN, set the agenda in the right direction.³ However, after September 11 the European governments have completely failed. They are obviously incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests and lending at least their support to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell against the hard-liners. The Bush administration seems to be continuing, more or less undisturbed, the self-centered course of a callous superpower. It is fighting now as it has in the past against the appointment of an international criminal court, relying instead on military tribunals of its own. These constitute, from the viewpoint of international law, a dubious innovation. It refuses to sign the Biological Weapons Convention. It one-sidedly terminated the ABM Treaty and absurdly sees its plan to deploy a missile defense system validated by the events of September 11. The world has grown too complex for this barely concealed unilateralism. Even if Europe does not rouse itself to play the civilizing role, as it should, the emerging power of China and the waning power of Russia do not fit into the pax Americana model so simply. Instead of the kind of international police action that we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again—conducted with state-of-the-art technology but still in the old style.

The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years’ War. Naturally there were good reasons, even normative ones, to forcibly remove the Taliban regime, which brutally oppressed not only women but the entire population. They also refused the legitimate demand to hand over bin Laden. However, the asymmetry between the concentrated destructive power of the electronically controlled clusters of elegant and versatile missiles in the air and the archaic ferocity of the swarms of bearded warriors outfitted with Kalashnikovs on the ground remains a morally obscene sight. This feeling is more properly understood when one recalls the bloodthirsty colonial history that Afghanistan suffered, its arbitrary geographic dismemberment, and its continued instrumentalization at the hands of the European power play. In any case, the Taliban regime already belongs to history.

BORRADORI: True, but our topic is terrorism, which seems to have taken up new meaning and definition after September 11.

HABERMAS: The monstrous act itself was new. And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with their hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation. Only in the surge of patriotism that followed did one begin to recognize the central importance the towers held in the popular imagination, with their irreplaceable imprint on the Manhattan skyline and their powerful embodiment of economic strength and projection toward the future. The presence of cameras and of the media was also new, transforming the local event simultaneously into a global one and the whole world population into a benumbed witness. Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse—everything that was not Hollywood anymore but, rather, a gruesome reality, literally took place in front of the “universal eyewitness” of a global public. God only knows what my friend and colleague experienced, watching the second airplane explode into the top floors of the World Trade Center only a few blocks away from the roof of his house on Duane Street. No doubt it was something completely different from what I experienced in Germany in front of the television, though we saw the same thing.

Certainly, no observation of a unique event can provide an explanation per se for why terrorism itself should have assumed a new characteristic. In this respect, one factor above all seems to me to be relevant: one never really knows who one’s enemy is. Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists, for example, in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too. Also, in these cases there is no concentration of forces or central organization, a feature that makes them difficult targets. But partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives in order to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists who are scattered around the globe and networked in the fashion of secret services. They allow their religious motives of a fundamentalist kind to be known, though they do not pursue a program that goes beyond the engineering of destruction and insecurity. The terrorism we associate for the time being with the name “al-Qaeda” makes the identification of the opponent and any realistic assessment of the danger impossible. This intangibility is what lends terrorism a new quality.

Surely the uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism. But the scenarios of biological or chemical warfare painted in detail by the American media during the months after September 11, the speculations over the various kinds of nuclear terrorism, only betray the inability of the government to at least determine the magnitude of the danger. One never knows if there’s anything to it. In Israel, people at least know what can happen to them if they take a bus, go into a department store, discotheque, or any open area—and how frequently it happens. In the U.S.A. or Europe, one cannot circumscribe the risk; there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.

This brings a threatened nation, which can react to such uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situation of perhaps overreacting and, yet, because of the inadequate level of secret intelligence, remaining unable to know whether or not it is in fact overreacting. Because of this, the state is in danger of falling into disrepute due to the evidence of its inadequate resources: both domestically, through a militarizing of the security measures, which endanger the constitutional state, and internationally, through the mobilization of a simultaneously disproportionate and ineffective military and technological superiority. With transparent motives, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned again of unspecified terror threats at the NATO conference in Brussels in mid-December [2001]: “When we look at the destruction they caused in the U.S.A., imagine what they could do in New York, or London, or Paris, or Berlin with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.”⁴ Of a wholly different kind were the measures—necessary and prudent, but only effective in the long term—the U.S. government took after the attack: the creation of a worldwide coalition of countries against terrorism, the effective control over suspicious financial flows and international bank associations, the networking of relevant information flows among national intelligence agencies, as well as the worldwide coordination of corresponding police investigations.

BORRADORI: You have claimed that the intellectual is a figure with historically specific characteristics, deeply intertwined with European history, the ninteenth century, and the onset of modernity. Does he or she play a particular role in our present context?

HABERMAS: I wouldn’t say so. The usual suspects—writers, philosophers, artists, scholars working in the humanities as well as in the social sciences—who speak out on other occasions have done so this time, too. There have been the usual pros and cons, the same snarl of voices with the familiar national differences in style and public resonance—it has not been much different from the Gulf or Kosovo Wars. Perhaps the American voices were heard faster and louder than usual—in the end, also somewhat more devoutly gubernatorial and patriotic. On one side, even leftist liberals for the moment seem to be in agreement with Bush’s politics. Richard Rorty’s pronounced positions are, if I understand correctly, not completely atypical. On the other side, critics of the operation in Afghanistan started from a false prognosis in their pragmatic assessment of its chances for success. This time, what was required was not only anthropological-historical knowledge of a somewhat specialized kind but also military and geopolitical expertise. I am not subscribing to the anti-intellectual prejudice, according to which intellectuals regularly lack the required expertise. If one is not exactly an economist, one refrains from judging complex economic developments. With regard to military issues, however, intellectuals obviously do not act differently from other armchair strategists.

BORRADORI: In your Paulskirche speech (Frankfurt, October 2001),⁵ you defined fundamentalism as a specifically modern phenomenon. Why?

HABERMAS: It depends, of course, on how one uses the term. “Fundamentalist” has a pejorative ring to it. We use this predicate to characterize a peculiar mindset, a stubborn attitude that insists on the political imposition of its own convictions and reasons, even when they are far from being rationally acceptable. This holds especially for religious beliefs. We should certainly not confuse fundamentalism with dogmatism and orthodoxy. Every religious doctrine is based on a dogmatic kernel of belief. Sometimes there is an authority such as the pope or the Roman congregation, which determines what interpretations deviate from this dogma and, therefore, from orthodoxy. Such orthodoxy first veers toward fundamentalism when the guardians and representatives of the true faith ignore the epistemic situation of a pluralistic society and insist—even to the point of violence—on the universally binding character and political acceptance of their doctrine.

Until the onset of modernity, the prophetic teachings were also world religions in the sense that they were able to expand within the cognitive horizons of ancient empires perceived from within as all-encompassing worlds. The “universalism” of those empires, whose peripheries seemed to blur beyond their boundaries, provided the appropriate background for the exclusive claim to truth by the world religions. However, in the modern conditions of an accelerated growth in complexity, such an exclusive claim to truth by one faith can no longer be naively maintained. In Europe, the confessional schism and the secularization of society have compelled religious belief to reflect on its nonexclusive place within a universal discourse shared with other religions and limited by scientifically generated secular knowledge. At the same time, the awareness of this double relativization of one’s own position obviously should not imply relativizing one’s own beliefs. This self-reflexive achievement of a religion that learned to see itself through the eyes of others has had important political implications. The believers could from then on realize why they had to renounce violence, in general, and refrain from state power, in particular, for the purpose of enforcing religious claims. This cognitive thrust made religious tolerance, as well as the separation between state and church, possible for the first time.

When a contemporary regime like Iran refuses to carry out this separation or when movements inspired by religion strive for the reestablishment of an Islamic form of theocracy, we consider that to be fundamentalism. I would explain the frozen features of such a mentality in terms of the repression of striking cognitive dissonances. This repression occurs when the innocence of the epistemological situation of an all-encompassing world perspective is lost and when, under the cognitive conditions of scientific knowledge and of religious pluralism, a return to the exclusivity of premodern belief attitudes is propagated. These attitudes cause such striking cognitive dissonances since the complex life circumstances in modern pluralistic societies are normatively compatible only with a strict universalism in which the same respect is demanded for everybody—be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist, believers or nonbelievers.

BORRADORI: How is the kind of Islamic fundamentalism we see today different from earlier fundamentalist trends and practices, such as the witch-hunts of the early modern age?

HABERMAS: There is probably a motif that links the two phenomena you mention, namely, the defensive reaction against the fear of a violent uprooting of traditional ways of life. In that early modern age, the beginnings of political and economic modernization may have given rise to such fears in some regions of Europe. Of course, with the globalization of markets, particularly the financial markets, and with the expansion of foreign direct investments, we find ourselves today at a completely different stage. Things are different insofar as world society is meanwhile split up into winner, beneficiary, and loser countries. To the Arab world, the U.S.A. is the driving force of capitalistic modernization. With its unapproachable lead in development and with its overwhelming technological, economic, political, and military superiority, the U.S.A. appears as an insult to their self-confidence while simultaneously providing the secretly admired model. The West in its entirety serves 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. What was experienced in Europe under more favorable circumstance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface. Philosophy in a Time of Terror
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Terrorism and the Legacy of the Enlightenment—Habermas and Derrida
• Part One
• Part Two
• Notes
• Index