Joseph O’Neill and the Post-9/11 Novel

Abstract

In the late fall and early winter of 2001, several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida were separately interviewed about this global event. Asked to comment on a range of issues provoked by 9/11 — from the business of nationalism in the twentieth century to postnationalism in the twenty-first — both reaffirmed their often antithetical views. In these dialogues, Habermas professed faith in the possibility that communicative actions might repair the violence of distorted communications caused by routine misunderstandings, ambiguity, deliberate deception, or terrorism (Habermas’s premier form of distorted communication); alternatively, Derrida remained l’enfant terrible of classical philosophy, championing indeterminacy and voicing his suspicion toward any large-scale system of control or understanding. A broad though useful way of framing these differences is to see them as linguistically opposed. For Habermas, language (in the form, say, of international treaties or human rights resolutions) should fix meaning and therefore delimit violence; for Derrida, fixed meaning is itself a form of violent coercion, insofar as it re-districts the subject into a series of ideological, political, and cultural schemes. Beyond their political import, these differences identify a central problem of representing 9/11. As a global event, 9/11 has been transmitted and translated by media, film, art, and literature to such a degree that, as Laura E. Tanner observes, the “categories of experience and affect must be rethought to account for paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the limitations of geography and the borders of the physiological body” (74).