The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 507
The Americans I know were profoundly grateful to Jacques.
He came to see us straightaway, when most had cancelled their
travel arrangements. The others were afraid, which is under-
standable. Another attack was feared, there was a real toxic
atmosphere, people felt sick. But he came to console us, to talk
to us and analyse us, so to speak. He went to Ground Zero.
Though Jacques could be hard on American politics, he was
loyal to Americans and especially to New Yorkers.^36When he landed on 26 September, Derrida was struck by an
upsurge of patriotism of a kind he had never seen in his life.
Everywhere, fl ags were fl ying, everyone was proudly affi rming how
proud they were to be American, rather as if the United States
had just been founded anew. The conference at the University of
Villanova was held from 27 to 29 September 2001, focusing on
the Confessions of Saint Augustine and ‘Circumfession’, but, even
with this theme, allusions to current events were unavoidable. Then
Derrida went to a conference at Columbia, where he wanted – and
needed – to weigh each of his words.
In New York, at the home of their mutual friend Richard Bernstein,
Derrida was glad to see Habermas again. They both had the feeling
of being very European, and knew they had to speak with consid-
erable caution, even with American intellectuals, and this brought
them even closer together.
In spite of what the cover might suggest, Le ‘concept’ du 11
septembre was not a book conceived by Derrida and Habermas,
nor even a dialogue between them. Written by a friend of theirs,
Giovanna Borradori, the work brings together, introduces, and
discusses the long interviews she had had separately with the two
philosophers. The book was fi rst published by the University of
Chicago Press as Philosophy in a Time of Terror. When it came out
in France, Derrida suggested the new title, as he wished to ‘draw
attention, under the vigilant surveillance of the quotation marks, to
the diffi culties one encounters in trying to form the “concept” of a
“thing” that is named by its date alone: “11 September”.’^37
The interview with Derrida was recorded in New York on 22
October 2001, three weeks after his arrival, at a time when it was
impossible and practically forbidden ‘to start speaking of anything,
especially in public, without ceding to this obligation, without
making an always somewhat blind reference to this date’.^38 In spite
of the terrible pressures imposed by the event, Derrida insisted on
holding to a nuanced position, at the risk of irritating some of his
American readers. Giving up on complexity would in his view be ‘an
unaccept able obscenity’,^39 as if he were being asked to bow down in
servitude.