L'Algerie, c'est le hors champ et le contrechamp, I'ailleurs de cet ailleurs qui vient troubler et contaminer l'ici et maintenant de l'espace. (Safaa Fathy, Tourney les mots) It is always hard to write the history of recent times, and still harder to write the history of the continuing present. Historical events on the other hand are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves. The moral obscenity that was wreaked on the US. has ushered in a new world of maximum damage, a world where fantasy cavorts with the real and death is the message.The obscenity also rang in this message: vacation from history is over and done with. As the globe is flattened into a single space, it is by the same stroke carved rigorously down the middle. In the conflict between East and West, the avant la lettre and the avant-garde, tradition and modernity, Islam, or a version of it, and Capitalism, one transnational movement confronts another. In between times, we realize how powerful is the appeal to religious orthodoxy; how insecure sense of the secular; how fragile any ideal of global cultural understanding. As the decade dribbles on with small arms sniping around an elephantdung Madonna, the artist takes the heat for a long moment of transition and reminds himself or herself of Fichus, written by Jacques Derrida, who speaking to the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Frankfurt, emphasized the linkage between global capital and local terror, and suggested that the activity of is now financed through speculation on the market, and that it is simultaneously capitalist and anticapitalist. 9/11 reminds us more so than it announced in New York or Washington that responsibility in this regard has never been more remarkable, more acute, more necessary. Never will a new thinking about Europe have been more urgent. 9/11 introduces a deconstructive critique that is sober, alert, vigilant, attentive to everything that, through the best-substantiated strategy, the most justified politicking rhetoric, media powers, spontaneous or organized trends of opinion, welds the political to the metaphysical, to capitalistic speculation, to perversion of religious or nationalistic influence, to sovereignist fantasy. And this, outside and inside Europe. all sides. These are simple words, but I repeat: on all sides. I have absolute compassion for the victims of September 11, but that does not prevent me from saying that I do not believe in the political innocence of anyone in this crime. And if my compassion for all of the innocent victims is infinite, it is so also in that I do not feel it only for those who lost their lives in America on September 11. Therein lies my interpretation of what should be what was named yesterday, according to the White House slogan, infinite justice: to not exonerate oneself from one's own wrongs and the mistakes of one's own politics, even when one has just paid the most horrific and disproportionate price for it. (Derrida 2002, 51-52)1 In another no less impressive essay, an unpublished 1978 lecture, Michel Foucault, in On Security and Terror, distinguished power from security, warning that the security state can quickly become a delirious and pathological one.2 This is nowhere more evident than in the cavalier way some members of the Bush Administration and the media talk about unleashing the FBI and CIA and curtailing liberties and branding people of Muslim origin in the fight against terrorism. Edward Said makes the case with force in the following terms: Pundits and hosts refer non-stop to our war with Islam, and words like jihad and terror have aggravated the understandable fear and anger that seem widespread all over the country Two people (one a Sikh) have already been killed by enraged citizens who seem to have been encouraged by remarks like Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz's to literally think in terms of ending countries and nuking enemies. …
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Jul 13, 2020
Regina Cazzamatta 
Open Access
