memes

Derrida's immediate response to 9/11 was pretty good and funny. Putting "crashed" in quotes is simultaneously classic Derrida and hilarious.

Borradori: Where were you on September 11?

Derrida: I was in Shanghai, at the end of a long trip to China. It was nighttime there, and the owner of the cafe I was in with a couple of friends came to tell us that an airplane had "crashed" into the Twin Towers. I hurried back to my hotel, and from the very first televised images, those of CNN, I note, it was easy to foresee that this was going to become, in the eyes of the world, what you called a "major event." Even if what was to follow remained, to a certain extent, invisible and unforeseeable. But to feel the gravity of the event and its "worldwide" implications it was enough simply to mobilize a few already tested political hypotheses. As far as I could tell, China tried during the first few days to circumscribe the importance of the event, as if it were a more or less local incident. But this organized interpretation, informed by the current state of U.S.-China relations (diplomatic tensions and incidents of various sorts), ended up having to yield to other exigencies: CNN and other international media outlets have penetrated Chinese space, and China too, after all, has its own "Muslim" problem. It thus became necessary to join in some way the "antiterrorist" "coalition." It would be necessary to analyze, in the same vein, the motivations and interests behind all the different geopolitical or strategico-diplomatic shifts that have "invested," so to speak, "September 11." (For example, the warming in relations between Bush and Putin, who has been given a freer hand in Chechnya, and the very useful but very hasty identification of Palestinian terrorism with international terrorism, which now calls for a universal response.) In both cases, certain parties have an interest in presenting their adversaries not only as terrorists—which they in fact are to a certain extent—but only as terrorists, indeed as "international terrorists" who share the same logic or are part of the same network and who must thus be opposed, it is claimed, not through counterterrorism but through a "war," meaning, of course, a "nice clean" war. The "facts" clearly show that these distinctions are lacking in rigor, impossible to maintain, and easily manipulated for certain ends.

Those called "terrorists" are not, in this context, "others," absolute others whom we, as "Westerners," can no longer understand. We must not forget that they were often recruited, trained, and even armed, and for a long time, in various Western ways by a Western world that itself, in the course of its ancient as well as very recent history, invented the word, the techniques, and the "politics" of "terrorism."

From https://press.uchicago.edu/books/derrida/derrida911.htm