Jacques Derrida: Deconstructionist PhilosobabblerThe following exchange took place during a conversation shortly after 9/11 between author Giovanna Borradori and the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida:
BORRADORI: September 11 [Le 11 septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?
DERRIDA: Le 11 septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are - and I want to insist on this at the outset - only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."
Derrida, Jacques (1930- ) Algerian-born French philosopher [noted for his development the theory of deconstruction and for such influential works as Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology (all 1967)]
[Sources: Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida]More Jacques Derrida anecdotesRelated Anecdote Keywords:
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