Martin McQuillan
327.88::323.28]:141.78
172.4:141.78
Deconstruction
of the Idiom ‘9/11’*
Abstract: the immanently divisible, transformative performance
of an auto-immune figure without totalisation as a process of
material inscription and the historicisation of difference in the
unpresentable of the here and now – these mutations are the
world in deconstruction today. That is why what is required most
urgently today is a critical, more-than-philosophy, deconstruction
as a reading practice up to the task of meeting with the beyond of
today’s representational frames.
Keywords: deconstruction, 9/11, date, event, global hegemony, Al
Qaeda, war on terror
‘I hope that there will be, “in Europe”,
“philosophers” able to measure up to the task…’
(Jacques Derrida1)
Ground Zero
There are, at least, three notable 11th of Septembers which a phrase such as
‘deconstruction after 9/11’ might make reference to in all its concentrated
singularity. There is most obviously, perhaps, the coordinated attacks in
which jumbo jets were hijacked and flown into the twin towers of the World
*
1
Lecture delivered at the Faculty of Media and Communications,
University of Singidunum, Belgrade, 17 March, 2010.
Derrida, J., ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, a Dialogue
with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. by G. Borradori,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.116.
Martin McQuillan
| 47
Trade Centre in New York City, the western portion of The Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, and a third crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing a total of 2,974 people in 2001. In the Anglo-Saxon idiom this
is what is meant by ‘9/11’, the order of month and day, in standard North
American usage and so foreign to an European eye, indicates the territorial
priorities through which this date is memorialised via the mnemonic of the
United States’ emergency services’ telephone number. This introduction will
be concerned, in part, with Derrida’s interview text with Giovanna Borradori
associated with this date. Let me also note two other significant ‘9/11’s that
will concern us here. Firstly, 11 September 1973 when a military coup in
Chile, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, toppled the Socialist
President Salvador Allende and began the 17-year reign of terror of General
Augusto Pinochet. A line can be drawn through the history of the ‘Cold War’
that connects the two anniversaries in more or less explicit ways. Finally,
11 September 1903, the birth-date of the German philosopher and cultural
critic Theodor Adorno. The same day on which the Adorno Prize is awarded
and on which in 2001 Jacques Derrida was the recipient, giving rise to the
address entitled ‘Fichus’, more of which later. I will make reference just to
these three ‘9/11’s although there are many more of equal significance: September 11 1919 one of many early interventions in Latin America, when U.S
Marines invaded Honduras to suppress revolution (three months before the
inauguration of the League of Nations); September 11 1921, when Nahal,
the first moshav ovdim in Israel was settled in the Jezreel Valley, deriving its
name from a biblical town allocated to the Zebulun, one of the twelve tribes;
September 11 1922, when the British Mandate in Palestine began; September 11 1941, when ground was first broken for the construction of the Pentagon, the same day as Charles Lindberg’s Des Moines speech in which he
accused the Roosevelt’s administration along with Britain and world Jewry
of pressing for war against Hitler; September 11 1965, when the First Air
Cavalry Division of the US army arrived in Vietnam and so began the new
tactics and doctrine of helicopter-borne assault synonymous with that war;
September 11 1970, when 88 of the hostages held by the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine after the hijacking of four jet liners bound for
New York were released at Dawson’s Field, Jordan, leaving mostly Jews or
Israeli citizens as hostages for a further 14 days (this and the Jordanian conflict which followed are the events from which the Palestinian group Black
September took their name); September 11 1978, the date of Prime Minister
Begin and Presidents Carter and Sadat’s meeting at Camp David for the first
comprehensive peace talk on the Middle East; September 11 1982, when
international forces guaranteeing the safety of Palestinian refugees in the
Lebanon following Israel’s invasion earlier that year, left Beirut (five days
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later thousands were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps by Christian
Phalangists invited to clear out terrorists from the camps by Israeli Defence
Minister Ariel Sharon); September 11 1989, when the iron curtain was first
breached as the border between Hungary and Austria was opened resulting
in a mass exodus of East Germans into West Germany; September 11 1990,
when President Bush Sr delivered the speech ‘Towards a New World Order’,
in which the phrase ‘new world order’ was used for the first time, in a televised address threatening the use of force against Iraq, which had recently
invaded its southern neighbour Kuwait; September 11 2005, when Israel
completed its ‘unilateral disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip; September 11
2007, when Russia tested the largest ever conventional weapon, ‘the Father
of all bombs’, after the threat to deploy such thermobaric, vacuum bombs
in Chechnya. I will not attempt to list those other 9/11s, all those massacres worthy of the name ‘9/11’, the ‘quantitatively comparable killings’, the
metaphorical appellation of an intense, single act of indiscriminate terroristic
or state violence conferred by the syntagm ‘9/11’: the 8,000 Kurds of the
Barzani tribe buried in mass graves in Southern Iraq, the 60,000 Kurds and
Shia Muslims killed after their uprising at the end of the first Gulf War, the
8,000 at Srebrenica as UN troops stood by un-mandated, the 10,000 killed at
Hama when the Syrian army bulldozed the city to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, the uncountable number murdered on the orders of Ceausescu in Timisoara; the list is sadly endless and no justice can be done to it. In so far as
9/11/2001 names a single day in which the death toll can be calculated with a
degree of certainty and in determinate places, the term retains a valuable and
measurable meaning that would be dissipated if it were to be metaphorically
transferred on to every similar (or incomparable) crime.
As a date, ‘9/11’ is both singular an essentially repeatable. It already names
more than itself in an uncanny way, its numerology having encouraged President Reagan to name September 11 Emergency Services day in 1986. The
use of the synecdoche as a mediatic and political shorthand always refers
beyond its own date to other dates and to an othering of dates and the date of
the other. Whenever the term ‘9/11’ is used in this way, a marker is put down
referring us to this day, 9/11/2001, as if citation of this date (or its foreshortening as 9/11) is enough by the power of reference, and the power of its referent, to understand that day and to be affiliated with all that this day entails.
The use of the term, seriously or casually, always works in this way in order
to address this day as if it were an inaugural invocation of an event specific
to that day. It does so paradoxically by allowing all of us who do not share
the same experience and knowledge of the singularity of that day to speak in
solidarity with that day through citation. That is through its essential repeat-
Martin McQuillan
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ability as a quotation. Thus, the signifier ‘9/11’ not only names a date by referring to it, but also speaks to other dates, those other dates upon which this
quotation can be recited, which in principle are endless. The singular date of
‘9/11’ contains within its citational structure a commitment to all those other
dates as the promise of its own memorial power. Thus, ‘9/11’, as a date, is already multiple. It makes the events of 9/11/2001 identifiable beyond its own
pure, past singularity. Consequently, that purity is effaced by the date’s own
citational structure (the very thing which gives its effect as a metonym). This
effacement is not an erasure; rather it is an effacement in the face of another
date. This other date, the date of the other, is the guarantee of the memory of
‘9/11’ as a repeatable and quotable citation and yet it is in the face of these
other dates that the intensity of ‘9/11’ as a name begins to ease. There are
other tomorrows, the world and history with it did not end on September 11th
2001, life goes on to memorialise ‘9/11’ and to survive it. Each date implies
the other, no dates without the other, ‘9/11’ comes around every year that is
what makes it singular. Thus, ‘9/11’ from the very beginning is marked by an
alterity that both inscribes and lessens the obscurity of its power. As soon as
it has been named as a date, there can be no one meaning. This is true of all
dating2 but no representation of a ‘single event’ holds sway in quite the same
way on the contemporary (or otherwise) scene according to a metonymic
insistence of this sort – the 5th of November perhaps, the 4th of July (if you
are American), 12th of July (if you are an Ulsterman), 14th of July (if you are
French), but these are now local examples.
That is to say, that, as with all these dates, there is something local and irreducibly idiomatic about the phrase ‘9/11’ even as it is deployed as a universal
metonym to foreshorten a considerable and complex discussion; used as often in censorious justification as in the memorial. The very term itself names
a problem, perhaps the problem, from which it emerges. The attacks of 9/11
were aimed at the Anglo-American idiom.3 They were aimed at the symbolic
heart of that idiom, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, New York
(just as with ‘9/11’s’ there are many ‘World Trade Centres’, only the one in
New York, by virtue of the dominant hegemony of the Anglo-American idiom is able to appropriate the regulating absolute of the definite article). These
towers that have dominated the visual vocabulary of so many representations
of New York, as a metonym of a metonym: the quintessential symbol of
2
3
On the modalities of dating, see Derrida, J., ‘Shibboleth’, in Acts of
Literature, ed. by D. Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.382-404.
Derrida, J., ‘Autoimmunity’, p.89.
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New York, New York as the quintessence of the Anglo-American idiom. This
idiom of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model that at once combines the impression of a certain un-restricted capital and un-moderated labour practices
(neither of which are in fact absolutely or rigorously uncompromised) with
a political discourse of techno-scientific military power which holds hegemonic sway over the institutions of international law and global diplomacy,
which in truth also emerge from this discourse. It is this idiom that once again
through the powerful projection of a metonym presents itself as the image
of globalisation, the material benefits of which are most assuredly reserved
for the western world and to the speakers of this idiom. I include Europe in
this idiom, although gestures are made towards a counter ‘social model’ of
capitalism; the difference is between degrees of ex-appropriation, reserved
for the west. In this sense, the selective benefits of globalisation and the selective application of international law are a scene of political, economic and
cultural transformation dominated by the Anglo-American idiom (English
which is the future of Latin, the language of Empire). To attack this idiom in
a highly concentrated and symbolic way is thus to challenge its global hegemony and its political, military and techno-capitalist power. It is to attack
the source of a telescopic projection of this idiom, a local (even a small) detail which through the magnifying effect of an ideological inversion presents
itself as a gigantic edifice towering over the entire world. It is to attack parochialism in its own backyard and so confirm the vulnerability of its projected
image and that which it represents. The Twin Towers operated as a figurative
short-hand for the techno-military capitalism that emerges from the West,
both a contemporary substitute for the once welcoming embrace of that other
emblem of New York City and idea of post-war, western global responsibility, the Statue of Liberty. In the 1980s and 1990s the World Trade Centre had
been a symbol that said ‘bring me your tried and hurried capital’; the twin
towers were the Romulus and Remus of a newly emerging Empire of capital,
the double columns inscribed in the pictogram ‘9/11’. At the edge of the East
River they were the promontory, the head-land (the cap as the French would
have it) of this world capital, the capital of capital. So frequently represented
in film and popular media, the towers were the glorious monuments at the
centre of an Empire that stretches around the earth and to the frontiers of the
imaginations of its subjects.4 New York itself as a name depends upon the
4
Obviously the use of the term ‘empire’ in relation to the United States of
America is not without its risks. If one can speak of a displacement in
the classical idea of sovereignty and of the dissolution of the nation state
as characteristic of the transformations to be seen at present in the geo-
Martin McQuillan
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double substitution of a town familiar with raiders and external assault, New
Jórvík. Such projections turn local details into towering monuments in the
imaginary of Empire: nothing is less impressive than the Arc de Triomphe,
nothing quite so comically ridiculous as Buckingham Palace, nowhere quite
as uninviting as lower Manhattan. The idiomatic depends on such demotic
short-hand; the metonym works because the reference is generalisable: all
the citizens of the world know that this corner of New York is the backyard
of Empire and that English is spoken there. It is therefore, a shared backyard,
a backyard of the mind as it were, one of those paradoxical instances of the
translatable idiom, like ‘je ne sais quoi’, ‘translatable’ or ‘universal’ because
it requires no translation. The same is also true of the Pentagon as a target
for the hijackers, as well as the use of jetliners as missiles, those symbols
of international business travel and the contraction of the parameters of the
globe. It was a calculated attack which understood the ‘representative flip’ by
which metonymic figures are projected onto metaphorical orders and these
orders are mistaken for the order of the day, in which media representation is
indistinguishable from a shared apprehension of the real.
Conversely, and for a long time (although I think now this particular image
has been demystified) the boldness of the attacks, arriving (seemingly) out of
a clear blue sky, allowed for the equal magnification of their perpetrators as
giants on the world stage, rather than the rump of a failed death cult lashing
political realm. Then whenever one uses the term ‘empire’ in relation
to the United States in its current configuration, then one must also
understand that the very idea of ‘empire’ itself, as it has been classically
understood since the empires of nineteenth-century Europe, is equally
under erasure in the epoch of globalisation. Accordingly, ‘empire’ here
does not designate a specific model of occupation, administration and
appropriation (although this sometimes happens) but rather indicates
a sphere of domination (politically, culturally, economically and
militarily). This after all is what lies behind the avowed strategy of
‘full spectrum domination’. Although the irresistibility and totality of
‘American Imperialism’ is very much in doubt, and clearly while the
models of domination utilised by American interests are not the same as
the European empires of the nineteenth century, it is not a mere clichéd
fantasy of ‘Frenchified’ leftists to speak of American Imperialism. It is
precisely this imperialist impulse that ruins everything one would wish to
celebrate about the United States. One might say, that the contradictory
and aporetic difficulties of the American Imperialist impulse are exactly
what place the idea of ‘empire’ in deconstruction today.
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out at its own one-time sponsor and ally. Here again the idiomatic enters into
the universal through a powerful metonymic projection. ‘Al Qaeda’ can be
translated from the Arabic as ‘camp’ or ‘base’ and more often than not this
is taken by a literal-minded western media to refer to the training camps for
Jihad, the existence of which provided the pretext for the swift retribution
handed out in Afghanistan, treating an entire nation for the actions of its own
aberrant synecdoche. However, perhaps the most appropriate way of translating ‘Al Qaeda’ is as it is used in the Arab idiom, meaning ‘database’, an
index of names or grouped identities. It is a base without foundation, a base
of relations only, which as relations, have an exchange value but no presence
as such. Just as this techno-thanato-teleological sect emerged as a figure of
global conspiracy, so any genuine organisational connectivity was dispersed
by the comprehensive and over-whelming response of the American military. If Al Qaeda, and its metonym Bin Laden, live on (and will out-live its
adversaries in the Bush regime), it is as the projection of a monstrous ideological inversion, whereby this local detail of the end of the Cold War comes
to represent (by confusion and design) a wider conflict between the followers
of the book and between the west and its others. No doubt there is a real Al
Qaeda and that they are capable of the most appalling acts of indiscriminate
violence (one of the effects of the deliberate opacity of ‘the war on terror’ has
been to remove the capacity for certainty and to encourage a residual doubt
with respect to the risk posed by such people). However, given the limited
scale of the ‘Al Qaeda’ problem and the extent of its operation since 9/11, it
is only by an extraordinary Munchausen’s projection which exploits the image of a genuine terror and real death, that it can be claimed that this group
(on its own, if it is one and if it is co-ordinated) represents an equal threat
to western values and hegemony as the mutually assured destruction of the
cold war or the lethal potential of the blitzkrieg.5 In this respect, Al Qaeda is
the least of the west’s enemies, and yet for the logocentric west names and
the naming of parts are important. The appellation of ‘Al Qaeda’ carries a
terrifying metonymic power, conferred onto the disparate groups that take
up this sobriquet in Iraq and other theatres, like the ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’,
who terrorised the seven seas for several generations as the name was handed
down to a successor on the wealthy retirement of each Dread Pirate Roberts.
5
John Reid when British Home Secretary expressed a view offered
by many before him that the nation now faced ‘probably the most
sustained period of severe threat since the end of the second world war’
(The Guardian, August 10 2006).
Martin McQuillan
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Undoubtedly, while the demarcations of the war on terror can be explained
as ideological inversions, they cannot be dismissed as such. They have now
been in process for so long and in such a sustained way that they have come
to define the parameters of a mutation in the very idea of war itself. The
war on terror, like any war on an abstract noun might, involves a profound
re-imagining of the relations and risk that informs this enterprise. It is not
merely the projection of a false consciousness as the exploitation of an image
of terror by the target itself as propaganda but it is the complete inculcation
of that set of imagined relations into material processes which brings about a
transformation in our very understanding and idea of the world today. However, as a transference of the mediatic-metonymic it is always multiple and
in contradiction. Hence, for example, the simultaneous power of Al Qaeda as
a phantomatic menace which lurks in the shadow of the west’s own suburbs,
schools and immigrant families, and the representation of it as a quasi-state
within a state, which, like the Mafia or the Median Cartel, operates as an
independent sovereign entity within and across national borders. It is hard to
forget the image of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pointing to a diagram produced by The Times of London, detailing the passageways and levels of Osama Bin Laden’s alleged lair in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, whereby in some ludicrous parody of science fiction Bin Laden was
said to have hollowed out a mountain for a secret base.6 Although I can recall
this mountain range being thoroughly strafed with ‘bunker-busting’ bombs,
I have no recollection of a CNN crew entering their fantastical interior. Here
the mutation of this ‘warfare’ is evident, the movement from an enemy identified by its sovereign status and identifiable borders, be they state borders
or an encampment, to a phantasmatic enemy able to cross boundaries unnoticed and to imbricate themselves in our closest spaces and the backyards of
our minds. The distinction between these two models cannot be rigorously
maintained, the representational flip between the two and back again happens so often that the destabilisation becomes permanent. Our established
representative frames require us to hold onto the intelligibility of traditional
models to explain new effects just as the evolution of the new swells those
models and that frame in unsustainable ways, the new inhabiting the old
as a mutation which representation must endeavour to represent but is not
6
See The Times, 29th November 2001. For an account of the genealogy of
this mythic lair see http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid3.
htm, including Donald Rumsfeld’s commentary on NBC’s ‘Meet the
Press’, 2nd December 2001. See also Mark C Taylor, ‘The Mythic Power
of Caves’, Los Angeles Times, 14th January 2002.
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obliged to understand. This is a mutation beyond the classically hybrid; it is a
transformation which calls for an entirely new (and so impossible) representational matrix. It is in the gap between this new critical philosophy (if that
is what it is) that may provide new representational frames and a transformative inscription, that the previously absurd, incomprehensible and irrational
becomes a material condition. The war on terror is replete with such examples of the generation of history through the inability to determine between
a textual effect and its material inscription. For example, the invention of the
legal category of ‘enemy combatant’ that at once requires the semblance of
an adherence to traditional protocols of war (Quantanamo Bay is in all but
name an internment camp for prisoners of this ‘war’) and their refusal as this
label ‘justifies’ an entirely new and unjust ‘legal’ non-place. Examples could
be multiplied all the way to Baghdad and Iraq’s nuclear neighbour, who by
the very possibility of working towards a nuclear capacity have de facto
earned the ‘rights’ of a nation-with-the-bomb independent of the existence
or otherwise of any such bomb.7 If one were to go too fast, in the spirit of
these accelerated mutations in the relations between sovereign and quasisovereign entities, I would say that this sort of transformation in global political culture is ‘deconstruction after 9/11’. That is, the immanently divisible,
transformative performance of an auto-immune figure without totalisation as
a process of material inscription and the historicisation of difference in the
un-presentable of the here and now. These mutations are the world in deconstruction today. If anyone ever doubted that there was truly ‘nothing outside
of the text’, as Gayatri Spivak’s translation so ably and problematically put
it,8 then the confusion between inscription and reality in our present mediatic
political culture should make us think that what is required most urgently to
track these accelerations is a critical, more-than-philosophy, deconstruction
as a reading practice up to the task of meeting with the beyond of today’s representational frames. To some this will sound like ‘postmodern-theory-fora-postmodern-war’. On the contrary, deconstruction after 9/11 has to be in
the manner or spirit of the values of enlightenment critique as the exercise of
reason and discernment as a potentially decisionary intervention and critical
judgement on the present, if an ‘academic’ understanding of the irrationalism
of the 9/11 attacks is to contribute to an awakening from obscurity and dog-
7
8
The language of managerialism and the audit culture of public
institutions in the west would be another good example of material
inscription at work, but that is another story.
Derrida, J., Of grammatology. Translated by G.C. Spivak. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University, 1976).
Martin McQuillan
| 55
matism in our political culture and in the cultures of Islam. It is for this reason that I earlier invoked the name of Adorno (and by extension, metonymy
perhaps, that of Benjamin) as an alternative tradition of an unconditional,
critical attitude to the present and of writing critique in a time of terror.
Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis
and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University, London, UK..
His main books are: Deconstruction without Derrida, 2012; The Paul de
Man Notebooks, 2012; The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty and the Theotropic, 2012; Roland Barthes, 2011; Deconstruction
Reading Politics, ed., 2008; Deconstruction After 9/11, 2008; The Politics of
Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, 2007.
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