“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? You are inviting me to speak here by recalling, as if in
quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space
and our private lives for five weeks now. Something fait date, I
would say in a French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history;
that is always what's most striking, the very impact of what is at
least felt, in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that
truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and, as they say
here, "unprecedented" event. I say "apparently immediate" because this
"feeling" is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large
extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed,
circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious
techno-socio-political machine. "To mark a date in history" presupposes,
in any case, that "something" comes or happens for the first and last
time, "something" that we do not yet really know how to identify,
determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in
unforgettable: 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. Unrefined and dogmatic, or else carefully
considered, organized, calculated, strategic—or all of these at once.
For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal
deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else.
Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning
available to us to name in any other way this "thing" that has just
happened, this supposed "event." An act of "international terrorism,"
for example, and we will return to this, is anything but a rigorous
concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we will be
trying to discuss. "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.”
Jacques Derrida zum 11. September.
Hier geht's weiter.
