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DERRIDA
by Dr. Stanley Sfekas

Political Science

Literature

Religion

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DECONSTRUCTS

BUSH

Jacque Derrida, the architect of the concept of deconstruction, died in September, 2004, of cancer at age 74. He has been praised
as a philosopher of the historical stature of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He was the last survivor of the extraordinary generation
of French philosophers of the decade of the 60s, along with Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucalt, Roland Barthe, and in the last few
decades, the most widely influential, most widely translated, and most widely read. Thanks to him, even the mass media
incorporated the term deconstruction into their vocabulary.
He had become the enfant terrible of French philosophy as early as 1966 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but his
reputation soared in 1976 with the translation into English of his De Grammatologie, and his influenced reached its peak in the
1990s at New York University.
To deconstruct is to criticize acutely what lies hidden and excluded behind words, to take an idea, (let us say war on terror), an
institution, or a given value, and understand its mechanisms. In relation to a dominant system of thought, it operates on the
analogy of intellectual guerilla warfare. Each word inevitably branches out into a network of textual and historical connections.
And every time Derrida turned his critical focus onto politics, he shed light on these hidden connections. Derrridas method

reigns supreme when it comes to demystifying the jungle of such concepts as collateral damage, smart bombs, and other
such euphemisms articulated by governments and corporate media.
Few samples of Derrida in action can be more essential than Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas
and Jacque Derrida by Giovanna Boradori, (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Here we have the two greatest living
philosophers of the European Philosophical tradition in New York, only a few weeks after September 11, 2001. Their
approaches may be different, but both Habermas and Derrida go to the heart of the matter, questioning on what basis terrorism
can claim a political contentand thus be separated from ordinary crime; whether there can be state terrorism; whether
terrorism can be sharply distinguished from war; and whether a coalition (whether it be of the willing or of the coerced) can
declare a war on something other than a political entity. As Derrida has put it: Bush speaks of war, but he is incapable of
identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war.
In brief, the new terror propaganda of the Bush administration holds that Bush is the only leader capable of prosecuting the war
on terror to its conclusion. At the same time, he blames the Joint Chiefs of Staff for any disastrous policy decisions on Iraq. He
also claims that Democratic contender John Kerry simply has not understood what the war on terror is all about. A cursory look
at the Bush administrations record and the neo-conservative agenda for the future reveals instead that Bush/Cheney are using
September 11 as an excuse to attack weak states that interfere with an extreme right-wing world view as well as with U.S.
corporate interests. Iraq was the first target; Syria and Iran will be the next. The Bush/Cheney scare of terrorist groups having
access to nuclear weapons is nonsense; terrorist groups do not have access to technology capable of enriching uranium, and no
government would give nuclear technology to a terrorist group. Moreover, no war on terror rhetoric can disguise the fact that
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri have not been captured.
The complexity of Derridas deconstruction of terrorism cannot be reduced to a mere sound bite. In response to the incessant
spinning of the media, Derrida lasers on the fact that terrorism can never be a self-evident conceptas the Bush
administration spins it. Then he goes on to deconstruct two equally problematic words: war and terrorism. Terror works
both ways, Derrida tells us: Whether we are talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Palestine, the bombs will never be smart
enough to prevent the victims (military and/or civilian, another distinction that has become less and less reliable) from
responding, either in person or by proxy, with what will be easy for them to present as legitimate reprisals or counter-terrorism.
And so on ad infinitum
For Derrida, the terrorists are, in a sense, us: Those called terrorists are not others, an absolute other whom we as
Westerners can no longer understand. We must not forget that they were recruited, trained and even armed 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.
The question becomes what kind of war this is. It is, says Derrida, a strange war without war. It often takes the form, at least
on the surface, of a conflict between two groups with a strong religious identification. On the one side, the only great Europeanstyle democratic power in the world that still has the death penalty in its judicial system and, despite the separation in principle
between church and state, a fundamental biblical (and primarily Christian) reference in its official political discourse and the
discourse of its political leaders: God Bless America, the reference to evildoers or to the axis of evil and the first rallying
cry (which was later retracted) of infinite justice would be but a few signs among so many others. And facing them, on the
other side, an enemy that identifies itself as Islamic, Islamic extremist or fundamentalist, even if this does not represent
authentic Islam, and all Muslims are far from identifying with it. No more in fact than all Christians in the world identify with
the United States fundamentally Christian profession of faith.
This leaves us, says Derrida, with a confrontation between two political theologies, both, strangely enough, issuing out of the
same stock of common soil, of what I would call an Abrahamic revelation.
Derrida emphatically deplores the absence of a dialogue between the West and Islam: In the course of the last few centuries
whose history would have to be carefully re-examined, (the absence of an Enlightenment age, colonization, imperialism and so
on) several factors have contributed to the geopolitical situation whose effects we are feeling today beginning with the paradox
of a marginalization and an impoverishment whose rhythm is proportional to demographic growth. These populations are not
only deprived of access to what we call democracybut are also dispossessed of the so-called natural riches of the land, oil in
Saudi Arabia, for example, or Iraq, or even in Algeria, gold in South Africa, and so many other natural resources elsewhere

These natural riches are in fact the only non-virtualizable and non-deterritorializable goods left today: they are the cause of
many of the phenomena we have been discussing. With all these victims of supposed globalization, dialogue (at once verbal and
peaceful) is not taking place. Recourse to the worst violence is thus often presented as the only response to a deaf ear. There
are countless examples of this in recent history, well before September 11. This is the logic put forward by all terrorisms
involved in a struggle for freedom. [Nelson] Mandela explains quite well how his party, after years of nonviolent struggle, and
faced with a complete refusal of dialogue, resigned itself to having to take up arms. The distinction between civilian, military
and police is thus no longer pertinent.
This leads Derrida to conclude that the terrorism of the September 11 sort (wealthy, hyper-sophisticated, telecommunicative,
anonymous, and without an assignable state) happened as a direct consequence of a global dialogue not taking place. There is
simply no meaningful dialogue between the rich and poor world: It is a simulacrum, a rhetorical artifice that dissimulates a
growing imbalance, a new opacity, a garrulous and hyper-mediatized noncommunication, a tremendous accumulation of wealth,
means of production, tele-technologies, and sophisticated military weapons, and the appropriation of all these powers by a small
number of states or international corporations.
And things will get even worse. Talking about the relation between terror, terrorism, and territory, Derrida worries that the abyss
of non-communication may lead to even greater, and invisible, dangers: The relationship between earth, terra, territory and
terror has changed, and it is necessary to know that this is because of knowledge, that is, because of techno-scienceIn this
regard, when compared to the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the
computerized networks of the world, September 11 is still a part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the
imagination. One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by
attacking the computer and informational networks, on which the entire life of the greatest power on Earth depends.
Meanwhile, we are squeezed between the two supposed war leaders, the two metonymies, bin Laden and Bush, and the war of
images and of discourses, at an ever quickening pace over the airwaves, dissimulating and deflecting more and more quickly the
truth that it reveals, accelerating the movement that substitutes dissimulation for revelation and vice versa. An example is the
massive Bush/Cheney disinformation campaign before during and after the invasion of Iraq.
Thus when Bush and his associates blame the axis of evil, we ought both to smile at and denounce the religious connotations,
the childish stratagems, the obscurantist mystifications of this inflated rhetoric.
Derrida then highlights the ultimate irony: the world order is based on the reliability and credibility of U.S. power. So by
exposing the fragility of the superpower, September 11 exposed the fragility of the world order itself. Before he died, Derrida
interpreted September 11 as in fact the implosive finale of the Cold War, killed by its own contradictions. But he went one step
further when he talked about the vicious circle of repression: by declaring a perpetual war against terrorism, the U.S. has
engendered a perpetual war against itself.
Derridas worst fears were crystallized in his suspicion that in the near future terrorism will have nothing to do with actual
attacks against actual places, like September 11, the Madrid bombings, or the daily bombings in Iraq. It will be virtual, and it
will erase all the remnants of the distinction between terrorism and war and even between war and peace: Nanotechnologies of
all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological
rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and thats whats scary.
Derridas works have always had apocalyptic implications, and, in turning his critical spotlight on the political domain, he
emerges consistent in elucidating the cryptic features of a rhetorical web of ideas that has proved to be imprisoning.

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