Oh dear. I’m not sure how I missed the delight of this interview of Derrida by Habermas on 9/11. I didn’t bother reading the whole interview, since the bit from Derrida quoted by Myrhaf was painful enough nonsense to consider. Here it is:
“Something” took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing.” But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event,” remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. 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.
In response, Myrhaf says:
Being a philosopher should make one more intelligent than the average man. It should give one the ability to make integrations most people cannot imagine. The philosophy of Jacques Derrida, maybe the most famous philosopher of the late 20th century, made him less intelligent than the average man. He could not understand what happened on September 11, 2001. The fact that people use the date to refer to what happened on that day seems to have baffled the man.
Personally, I regard Derrida as a charlatan, as a deliberate, calculated spouter of nonsense, amused by the tricks he plays upon his gullible followers. (That doesn’t make him admirable in any way, of course.) It’s rather pathetic that the scheme works, since his work is such transparent nonsense.
Consider his claim that “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.” In fact, the reality is simple enough: We, the non-philosophically-deranged people of the world, use a proper name (“9/11″ and its variants) to refer to a rather significant event that occurred on that particular day. Unlike those who regard Derrida as wise, we know exactly what we are talking about.
