Habermas). Derrida’s commentary on 9 / 11 is frustrating on
several accounts. He begins with expansive speculation, dwell-
ing especially on the phrase “major event” in relation to 9 / 11.
“What is an event worthy of this name?” Derrida asks. “And a
‘major’ event, that is, one that is actually more of an ‘event,’
more actually an ‘event,’ than ever? An event that would bear
witness, in an exemplary or hyperbolic fashion, to the very
essence of an event or even to an event beyond essence? For
could an event that still conforms to an essence, to a law or to
a truth, indeed to a concept of the event, ever be a major
event?” (Philosophy 9 ). Not surprisingly, all these Derridean
questions remain open. (In an essay published in the New York
Timesa few days after Derrida’s death, Edward Rothstein
quoted with disapproval Derrida’s ornate comment on the
phrase “September 11 ”: “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 know
how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking
about.”)^11
Derrida declares that the 9 / 11 massacre “will have tar-
geted and hit the heart, or, rather, the symbolic head of the
prevailing world order. Right at the level of the head (cap, caput,
capital, Capitol), this double suicide will have touched two
places at once symbolically and operationally essential to the
American corpus” (Philosophy 95 – 96 ). Only a few weeks after
the biggest terrorist assault in history, near the ruins of the site,
stood Jacques Derrida, darting and punning in his fluent way.
After having wondered whether there is such a thing as
an event, much less a major event, Derrida goes on to ask if
there really are terrorists. “In the first place, what is terror?
What distinguishes it from fear, anxiety, and panic?” ( 102 ). He
concludes that “‘terrorist’ acts try to produce psychic effects
238 Politics, Marx, Judaism