Comment and Responses

JR: Different as they are, the comments and criticisms made by the different commentators I think have one chief point in common. This common point is time and issues of timeliness or untimeliness. On the one hand, Kirstie McClure asks the question whether this consideration about Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek demos are relevant to the current political situation in the United States, especially after September 11^th and she tried to bridge the gap with me, that would have been thought as a gap, and also as a kind of transatlantic gap. On the other side, Michael Dillon also set time as a key issue. Michael’s point is quite different, I would say attacking from the river side because according to him I make politics the effect of the atemporal, ahistorical, structural difference occurring in a kind of sheer chronological time. So I would miss not so much a reference to the present than the untimeliness of time itself, time as original difference as conceptualized by Heidegger and Derrida.

So what about time? And I would first ask the question: In which time are we exactly? We are living here in the first year of the third Christian millennium in the most advanced among advanced countries. Now who is the main character, the main reference claimed to legitimate both the World Trade Center attacks and the strikes in Afghanistan? Neither Plato nor Aristotle, somebody much older than them, God, the God of Moses and Haberon. And which words did we hear arrayed everywhere during the days and weeks following the attack? Good and Evil, hate and love. Two couples of words that don’t exactly sound as attuned to the ear of digitalization and virtual reality that so many thinkers are proclaiming. Precisely those words remind us that there is no constraining relation between the rationality of scientific and technological invention and any kind of rational government. The current situation shows more than ever that there is no straight history leading to rational form of coexistence of rational governments. You can be the head of a financial network and at the same time a warrior of God.

Each present is not of present and past, not of temporalities. Each present may be grasped within a plot of temporality interweaving and possibly clashing different lines of temporality. And politics is one of those interweavings of time. The war of the servants of God against the enemies of God is another. So let me assume that my research is not irrelevant to the kind of situation we are now facing. Incommensurable as the evidence maybe and as Aamir Mufti said, I think that the situation we are facing now and here has some strong relation with the kind of situations that prompted me to write about politics. The “Ten Theses” epitomize an investigation on politics, addressing some issues raised from the national and international situation of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Over that period, especially in the ‘80s, a notion turned out to be increasingly pervasive — the notion of the end. It was the time of the end of communism, end of utopias, of ideology, of history, and sometimes of politics itself. And it was claimed at every street corner. And on the other end, especially in France maybe, there was a seemingly opposite claim to a return of politics. I insist that it was not a mere European or French affair. The end of history, as is well known, came to France from the United States. And even the return of politics or the return of “the political” came to us strangely through reactualization of such thinkers as Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt who were obvious used, I would say, to bestow a sense of great philosophical Greek tradition on American constitutionalism and eventually on values of the Reagan era.

So I think there is a kind of transatlantic transaction and only not only a French affair. Note the question was, what is involved in those seemingly opposite statements of the end and the return of politic. In fact, it was the same idea. The idea that the old schemata of politics in...