Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Giovanna Borradori interviewed leading philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida on what they thought to be the significance of the event. The interviews were published along with Borradori’s commentary in a short book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror. The book offers two very different evaluations of the event of 9/11 from the two contemporary but antagonistic thinkers.
Unsurprisingly, Jacques Derrida directed our attention to the “phenomenon of language, naming, and dating” and to the compulsion to repetition.[i] Speaking of 9/11, he said:
“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 a 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.[ii]
Derrida saw as significant the naming of the “event” as a date. No name could do justice to or even hint at the fullness of what occurred that day. No name could capture the complete historical context of the attacks, nor the shock and sorrow, the loss of life, the grief and agony, the murderous intent and the responses of heroism. There is much we will never know and for which we’ll never have a name. That being said, the name “chosen” through its repetition was “9/11,” “September 11,” a date. A name identifies what something is and excludes what it is not according the name. The name “September 11” would at first seem to include all such dates in time and exclude the 364 other days in the year. It’s a date that occurred before and has occurred after the attacks on that day, yet unless that date holds other special significance for someone, its naming probably brings to mind first and foremost that horrific event. The question is, why name the event with the day it happened? That is a question Derrida encouraged us to ponder.
Borradori provided an answer:
Referring to an event with a date automatically gives it historical stature: it monumentalizes it. Naming the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “9/11” alleviates the sense of responsibility for the failure to prevent them as well as the sense of vulnerability that such failure inevitably provokes.[iii]
In other words, the naming of the event “9/11” isolates the meaning of the event within the boundaries established by that name, stresses the significance of the event as contained within those boundaries, and decreases or dismisses the significance of what is excluded from those boundaries. The naming and repetition of the name without asking what is named obscures the full meaning of the event: repetition without reflection traps one in the name, in the construct, in this case, a construct that conceals more than it reveals. Derrida cautioned against the entrapment of language, calling us “to understand what is going on precisely beyond language and what is pushing us to repeat endlessly and without knowing what we are talking about, precisely there where language and the concept come up against their limits: ‘September 11, September 11, le 11 septembre, 9/11.’”[iv]
Derrida deconstructed the name “9/11” in order to open the name (and us who use it) to that which occurred beyond the name. An endless and thoughtless repetition of “9/11” hinders our understanding of the event. Granted, Borradori’s interview with Derrida happened mere weeks following the terrorist attacks, when historians, politicians, pundits and others were still just beginning to compose narratives explaining it. Nevertheless, the repetition (without knowing) of “9/11” continued and continues to this day. Moreover, the name served as the basis of other linguistic expressions endlessly repeated and little reflected upon.
In December of 2003, the Vice President gave political stature to one of these expressions: “9/11 changed everything.” He clarified the hyperbolic statement: “9/11 forced us to think in new ways about threats to the United States, about our vulnerabilities, about who our enemies were, about what kind of military strategy we needed in order to defend ourselves.” The other oft repeated expression, hyperbolic in its own way, is that we now live in a “post-9/11 world.” This expression builds upon the monumentalizing effect of “9/11” by categorizing world history into that which came before and that which came after 9/11, establishing a framework by which we understand the event in history—and history itself. The name “post-9/11 world” raises 9/11 to the level of historical significance of, say, the industrial revolution or modernity; “post-9/11 world” joins the expressions “post-modern” and “post-industrial” as signifiers of major historical division and categorization, markers in a historical framework. The name “post-9/11 world” could indicate 9/11 as the marker. After all, it changed everything.
The repetition of “9/11 changed everything” and “post-9/11 world,” rather than spur serious thought on how to respond appropriately to the attacks, brings thought and conversation concerning our response to a halt. Practices deemed out of bounds, torture for instance, have found defenders who repeat the statement “9/11 changed everything” as justification for such practices. Is torture morally wrong? Illegal? Irrelevant. 9/11 changed everything. In a post-9/11 world, we have to keep ourselves safe by whatever means necessary. Repetition takes the place of argument.
If we do not know what we are saying or naming by the repetition of “9/11” or “September 11,” and if we do not know what we are talking about in that naming and repetition, then our responses may not even be responding to the event itself (albeit as understood as mediated through language). They may be responses to an isolating linguistic expression constructed by the naming and repetition of 9/11, or extensions of that construction. To the extent that we move from thinking to action, when we act in response to “9/11,” we act in response to “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” to use the telling terms of Donald Rumsfeld. It would not be a stretch to say that, in so far as we remain trapped in that name, we don’t know what we are doing or whether what we are doing will be beneficial or disastrous.
Posted by Kyle R. Cupp 
Posted by Kyle R. Cupp 
