The Time of Dialogue 2000–2002 505
It was nighttime there, and the owner of the café I was in with a
couple of friends came to tell us that an airplane had ‘crashed’
into the Twin Towers. I hurried back to my hotel, and from
the fi rst televised images, those of CNN, I note, it was easy to
foresee that this was going to become, in the eyes of the world,
what you called ‘a major event.’ [.. .] As far as I could tell, China
tried during the fi rst few days to circumscribe the importance of
the event, as if it were a more or less local incident.^30The following day, Derrida began his lecture at the Fuda
University by mentioning the gravity of the moment and the
tragedy that had occurred overnight: it marked, he claimed, a new
and unpredictable phase in world history.^31 The lecture he gave at
Hong Kong a few days later on ‘globalization and the death penalty’
was considered to be the most brilliant and passionate for twenty
years, but Derrida’s heart and mind were now in New York, where
he was expected a few days later and where he had so many friends.
The catastrophe that had just struck the world, and would become
a major spur to his ideas, had instantly driven away his melancholy.
From Hong Kong, he wrote to Catherine Malabou:
This trip will have been extraordinary, because of what I have
discovered on it, because of the ‘malady’ I was dragging around
deep inside, that stopped me, much as ever, being where I was
(that’s what ‘travelling’ with myself means for me) – and above
all because of what razed the World Trade Center, a place dear
to my heart in many ways for twenty years and where I had
hoped to take you to enjoy, with you, from the 130th fl oor, the
most beautiful view of New York.^32Before he went to the United States, however, he had to stop in
Frankfurt, where, on 22 September, he was awarded the Adorno
Prize, probably the most important distinction he ever received.
This prize, created by the City of Frankfurt in 1977 in memory of
the philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno,
was given every three years to an oeuvre which, in the spirit of the
Frankfurt School, cut across the domains of philosophy, the social
sciences, and the arts. Previous recipients had included Habermas,
but also Pierre Boulez and Jean-Luc Godard.
It was in German that Derrida spoke the fi rst and the last para-
graph of a superb lecture called ‘Fichus’. Even more than Adorno,
Walter Benjamin was the object of his emphatic homage, recalling
in passing one of the most tragic moments in his destiny.
As an epigraph to this modest and simple expression of grati-
tude, I would like to being by reading a sentence that Walter