511494

Picturing Terror: Derridas AutoimmunityAuthor(s): W.J.T.MitchellSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 277-290Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511494 .Accessed: 12/06/2015 14:00

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Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007)

2007 by The University of Chicago. 00931896/07/33020010$10.00. All rights reserved.

277

This paper was originally written for the Cardozo Law Schools symposiumon Derrida inFebruary 2005 and appears in a somewhat different version inCardozo Law Review 27 (Nov.2005): 91325.

1. See Jonathan Kandell, JacquesDerrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74,New YorkTimes, 10 Oct. 2004, p. A1.

Picturing Terror: Derridas Autoimmunity

W. J. T. Mitchell

It is a bad time, we are told, for criticism and theory. TheNewYorkTimesdeclares that theory is dead and then attempts to drive a stake through itsheart by dismissing its most brilliant practitioner, Jacques Derrida, as anabstruse philosopher whose popularity in American academia is a mys-tery.1 Only one year earlier the New York Times performed a similar post-mortem on the greatest critic of our time, Edward Said. The coincidence isworth pondering: an Algerian Jewish philosopher and a Palestinian Chris-tian literary critic turned out to be themost inuential gures in theAmer-ican academic humanities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Bothwere engaged intellectuals, not just in the promotion of their ethnic orpolitical communities and constituencies but in the critique of the very in-tellectual movements they inspired: postcolonial and deconstructive criti-cism. Both were utopian, futuristic thinkers, urging on us the possibility ofa radical mutation of human thoughtfor Said, a commitment to the be-ginnings of a democratic and unied nation of Israel/Palestine; forDerrida,a global vision of justice and democracy to come. Both were accused ofbeing professors of terror, the favorite canard of themilitant ignorance andstupidity that passes for thinking in some quarters of American culture to-day.

For Said, terrorism was an unavoidable and straightforwardly ideo-logical issue. By writing as a Palestinian, by insisting on his concrete his-


278 W. J. T. Mitchell / Derridas Autoimmunity

2. EdwardW. Said, Israel, Iraq, and the United States, FromOslo to Iraq and the RoadMap(New York, 2004), pp. 21415.

3. SeeMitchMcConnell et al., Designation of Territory Controlled by the PalestinianAuthority as Terrorist Sanctuary, sec. 4 of Palestinian Anti-TerrorismAct of 2006, S.2370,introduced in the U.S. Senate, 109th Cong., 6 Mar. 2006.

torical identity in solidarity with both the Palestinian diaspora and thepeople living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Saidsubjected himself to the label and the stereotype of one of themost vilied,despised peoples on the planet. The word Palestinian has been renderedsynonymous with terrorist in the American vernacular. As Said noted bit-terly in one of his late essays, Israel, Iraq, and the United States: It isworth recalling that the word terrorist began to be employed systematicallyby Israel to describe any Palestinian act of resistance beginning in themid-1970s.2 And this word has indeed been elevated into an idol of the mindin the past thirty years, a gure of exaggerated power and fantastic muta-bility, not tomention radical evila perfect foil to the equally radical good-ness of its self-appointed opponents. Said would know how to appreciatethe recent vote of the United States Senate to declare the West Bank andGaza terrorist sanctuaries,3 thus declaring the occupation legal by theirlights and justifying even more ferocious interdictions in the everyday livesof innocent people under a regime of systematic state terrorism. The his-torical facts about terrorismthat yesterdays terrorist is tomorrows leaderof a liberation movement; that terror is an instrument of states as well asnongovernmental actors; that terrorism is rarely an act of madness, but ofrational calculation; that the evil of terrorism is usually located in itsmeans,rarely (if ever) its endsall this is totally ignoredby themoralisticposturingthat passes for criticism of the phenomenon of terror as simply evil. Ofcourse the murder of innocent people for political aims is morally repre-hensible and ought to be condemned, whether it is done by Islamic fun-damentalists on suicide missions or in the name of collateral damageresulting from high-altitude bombing of civilian populations where sus-pected terrorists might be located. Perpetrators of both these kinds of actsshould be subjected to criminal prosecution in international courts, how-ever, not peremptory assassinations and the so-called surgical strikes thatkill the innocent along with the guilty.

In contrast to Said, Derrida approached the question of terrorism fromthe outside, focusing on its psycho-political structure from a position of

W. J . T. Mitchell is editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book isWhatDo Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005). This essay is part of a book in progress,Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.


Critical Inquiry / Winter 2007 279

4. Giovanna Borradori,Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas andJacques Derrida (Chicago, 2003), p. 108; hereafter abbreviated PTT.

5. SeeW. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: TheWar of Images, unpublished essay, delivered aslecture at the University of Munich, 2 Dec. 2004; see http://www.iconicturn.de/staticpages/index.php?pageStreamMitchell.

6. Jean Baudrillard, The Final Solution: Cloning beyond the Human and the Inhuman,TheVital Illusion, ed. JuliaWitwer (New York, 2000), p. 3; see pp. 329 for a compendiumofcontemporary fantasies about the horror of cloning.

relative detachment. Even though deconstruction has sometimes been re-garded as a kind of intellectual terrorism (an issue that I will return to later)Derridas own discussion of it, in his reections on the attacks of 9/11, isremarkable for its almost clinical and analytic tone and for its emphasis onthe fantasmatic, spectacular, andmediated character of terrorism: the realterror, argues Derrida, consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing andexploiting . . . the image of this terror by the target itself.4

Derrida was one of the principal inspirations for what I have called thepictorial turn in modern studies of culture and media. He is in many waysresponsible for moving beyond the linguistic turn in the human sciencesdescribed by Richard Rorty toward a renewal of traditional disciplines suchas aesthetics, iconology, and art history, and the emergence of new for-mations such as visual culture and the study of media, especially of thema-teriality of media, as well as its equally important immaterialitywhatDerrida called spectrality, the ghostly realm of imagination, fantasy, specu-lationthe subject of a hauntology that renders all things or objectsall beings in other wordsuncanny.

Derrida has always been, then, a primary source of inspiration for myownwork as an iconologist, a scholar of images across themedia.Andnevermore so than inmy current work, which has turned toward apeculiarnexusin the discourse of biopolitics, the convergence of terrorism with cloningas cultural icons of the principal techno-scientic anxieties of our time.5

The importance of terrorism and the so-called war on terror, which hasreplaced the cold war as the major global image of conict in our time,scarcely needs demonstrating. Cloning likewise immediately elicits imagesof horror, raising the spectre of a revival ofNazi eugenics, a brave newworldof engineeredorganisms, test-tubebabies,mutants, replicants, andcyborgs,of reproduction without sexual dierence. The gure of the clone itself, asa mindless, even headless repository of spare parts, the reduction of thehuman being to bare life, the acephalic gure, as Jean Baudrillard puts it,all turn out to be handy images for the gure of the terrorist himself.6 Ter-rorist and clone unite in the stereotype of the mindless automaton, an or-ganism whose individuality has been eliminated, t only for a suicidemission. Small wonder that the images of Palestinian suicide bombers cir-



7. Leon R. Kass, foreword toHuman Cloning and HumanDignity: The Report of the PresidentsCouncil on Bioethics (New York, 2002), pp. xvxvi.

culated on the internet are almost indistinguishable from the faceless clonearmy of the second episode of the Star Wars saga, Attack of the Clones. Andno surprise that the horror of terrorism has been brought in to support thehorror of cloning, as in the report of the Presidents Council on Bioethics,which explicitly links cloning to the terrorist attacks of September 11: SinceSeptember 11 . . . one feels a palpable increase in Americas moral serious-ness. . . . Wemore clearly see evil for what it is. . . . [We understand the needfor] a prudent middle course, avoiding the inhumanOsama bin Ladens onthe one side and the post-humanBraveNewWorlders on the other.7Thereare many other reasons for thinking of cloning and terrorism together.There is the historical fact of their coincidence as political issues: on Sep-tember 11, the lead story in theNew York Times was (and had been for overtwo months) the controversy over stem-cell research and human cloning,which had occasioned the unveiling of President Bushs faith-based sciencepolicy. There is also a kind of metaphorical convergence in the sense thatcloning, as a gure for indenite duplication of a life-form, is somehow themost apt image of the process bywhich terrorist cells breed and clone them-selves. The comparison of terrorism to a virus or cancer, of invisible sleepercells hidden inside the body waiting to strike, and of course to the biblicalpredictions of plague and pestilence in the last days all converge with theprospect of literal bioterrorism to make this a potent and inevitable icon inthe collective imagination.

Derrida provides a larger framework for the convergence of cloning andterror. In his interview with Giovanna Borradori shortly after 9/11, in dis-cussing terror he turned to a biological metaphor, but one focused onthe totality of the organism, namely, the immune system, in contrast to thegure of the clone, which is an image of individual soldiers or cellstheantibodies and antigens on the biopolitical battleeld. Derrida diagnosedthe attacks of September 11 as a distant eect of the Cold War, moreprecisely, of a Cold War in the head, a global head cold that had nowmutated in an autoimmunitary process . . . that strange behavior where aliving being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, itself works to destroy its own pro-tection, to immunize itself against its own immunity (PTT, pp. 92, 94).

At rst glance, this diagnosis of terrorism seems counterintuitive, per-haps even in bad taste. It seems to blame the victim, the United States andthe global system of which it is the head, for bringing on the attacks or evenfor a quasi suicide. The image of autoimmunity would seem more strictlyapplicable to something like a military coup detat, in which the armed de-



8. I am indebted here and throughout to conversations about the immune systemwith Dr.Hajo Grundmann, senior lecturer of epidemiology at the National Institute for Public Health andthe Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands.

9. Baudrillard,The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London, 2002), p. 40.10. Donna J. Haraway, The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitution of Self in Immune

SystemDiscourse, Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), p.205. For a capsule history of the evolution of immunology, see Francisco J. Varela andMark R.Anspach, The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation, inMaterialities of Communication, trans.WilliamWhobrey, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K.Ludwig Pfeier (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 27385.

fenders of the external borders and the internal order, the army and thepolice, turn against the legitimately constituted government, attacking thelegislature, the judiciary, and deposing the executive.8 The terror attacks ofSeptember 11 came, we want to say, from outside the body politic, from faraway places like theMiddle East; it was an attack by aliens, by foreignbod-ies that had taken advantage of American hospitality to inltrate our bor-ders. Derridas image of autoimmunity, and of the immune system moregenerally, seems to be stretched to the breaking point.

But, on reection, the stretching of themetaphor seems to be exactly thepoint. The limits, borders, boundaries of the body (politic), its relations ofinside/outside, friend/enemy, native/alien, literal/gurativeareexactlywhatis in question in the metaphor of the immune system and in the new phe-nomenon of international terrorism, which is quite distinct from the ter-rorism of local resistancemovements (Ireland, Palestine, Spain) focusedona denite territory. The United States is, as Derrida points out, not just adistinct body politic with its own determinate borders and identity; it is thecapital head of world capital, the chief organ of a much larger, globalbody, the contemporary world system (PTT, p. 96). The attacks of Septem-ber 11 were not merely on U.S. territory but on theWorld Trade Center, thesymbolic Twin Towers (whose uncanny twinness or clonal character hasbeen the subject of a great deal of commentary already; asBaudrillardnotes,The Twin Towers no longer had any facades, any faces . . . . as thougharchitecture, like the system, was now merely a product of cloning, and ofa changeless genetic code).9 Like the boundaries of the world system, likeglobalization itself, the metaphor of the immune system stretches out tocomprehend at least one dimension of the totality of the present historicalreality.

In selecting the gure of autoimmunity as a tool for analyzing modernterrorism, Derrida chose an image with considerable surplus value, onewhose immediate applicability is startling and that continues to resonatewell beyond the use he makes of it. As Donna Haraway points out, theimmune system is both an iconic mythic object in high-technology cultureand a subject of research and clinical practice of the rst importance.10 It



11. For an excellent discussion of the metaphor in ancient philosophy, see John Protevi,Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (London, 2001).

12. Hans Belting remindsme that this bipolar image also has a religious foundation in theconcept of corpus Christi, the body of Christ, which is both the collective body of believers and theEucharistic body consumed in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The same undecidable gure ofpart for whole, whole for part, synecdoche and reverse synecdoche operates in the Christologicaldiscourse.

13. ArthurM. Silverstein,AHistory of Immunology (San Diego, 1989), p. 1.14. As Derrida puts it, What is terrible about September 11 . . . is that we do not knowwhat it

is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it (PTT, p. 94).

is important to stressHaraways insistenceon thedoublenessof theconcept,its status as iconic on the one hand and as an indispensable research toolon the other. That is, we can try to resist the image as a mere metaphor, aloose analogy, but it keeps coming back to haunt us in the biological guresthat are part of the ordinary language for describing terrorism and in theunavoidable language of biomedical research. Evenmore interesting iswhatI want to call the bipolar character of the entire foundationalmetaphor thatDerridas gure presumes, namely, the ancient gure of the body politic.11

This image, which invites us to see the collective, society, the nation, man-kind, even all living things as one body, is reversible. That is, we nd our-selves speaking, whether we want to or not, of the political body as well asthe body politic.12And it turns out that the very notion of immunity as suchis originally based in a sociopolitical discourse, not a biological one: TheLatin words immunitas and immunis have their origin in the legal conceptof an exemption, a sense that returns in the notion of diplomatic immu-nity.13 The whole theory of the immune system and the discipline of im-munology is riddled with images drawn from the sociopolitical sphereofinvaders and defenders, hosts and parasites, natives and aliens, and of bor-ders and identities that must be maintained. In asking us to see terror asautoimmunity, then, Derrida is bringing the metaphor home at the sametime he sends it abroad, stretching it to the limits of the world. The eectof the bipolar image, then, is to produce a situation in which there is noliteral meaning, nothing but the resonances between two images, one bio-medical, the other political.

The impossibility of a literal meaning, of course, means that we literallydo not know what we are talking about or what we are literally talkingabout.14 We are caught in the circuit between two images, dancing in thealternating current between two realms of discourse. For Derrida, this ad-mission of ignorance is crucial because the real politics of theautoimmunitymetaphor, beyond its power to deconstruct all the easy, Manichean binaryoppositions that have structured the war on terror, is the restaging of ter-rorism as a condition that needs to be thought through analytically, system-



15. It must be said, however, that Derrida is far less interested in pursuing the metaphor of theimmune system in its proper realm of immunology than I am. He does not privilege this notion,as he says, out of some excessive biologistic or geneticist proclivity (quoted in Rodolphe Gasche,In the Name of Reason: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty, review of Rogues: Two Essays onReason, by Derrida, in Research in Phenomenology 34 [2004]: 297).My aim here is to explore theexcess or supplementarity of the metaphor.

16. The clonal selection theory of acquired immunity was developed by FrankMcFarlaneBurnet, who won the Nobel Prize for his eorts. See The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, s.v. FrankMcFarlane Burnet, http://www.els.net.

17. As of 15 June 2006, TheReligionofPeace.com,a right-wingwebsite, counts 5,159 terroristattacks worldwide since 9/11. Their conclusion, however, is that Islam itself is the principal danger.

ically, and without moral tub-thumping, exactly as we would approach thediagnosis of a medical condition.15 Even more far-reaching is the implica-tion that a mutation will have to take place in our entire way of thinkingabout justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization,military power, the re-lations of nation-states, the politics of friendship and enmity in order toaddress terrorism with any hope of an eective cure (PTT, p. 106). In otherwords, we have something to learn here. Preestablished certainties are ex-actly the wrong medicine.

But one clue is oered by the metaphor (and the literal operations) ofthe immune system itself. There are two systems in the human body thatare capable of learning. One is the nervous system (to which we will returnin a moment); the other is the immune system, which learns by clonal se-lection, the production of antibodies that mirror the invading antigens andbond with them, killing them.16 The implications of this image are quiteclear. The appropriate strategy for international terrorism is not war, butrational, open, public institutions of international justice.Thewaron terroris like pouring gasoline on a re or (to maintain the biopolitical analogy)like massive, unfocused doses of radiation or surgical intervention, over-reactive treatments that fail to discriminate the body from its attackers oreven that stimulate the proliferation of pathogens. The fact that the war onterror has been accompanied by a measurable increase in the number ofterrorist attacks (London, Madrid) and accelerated the recruitment of ji-hadists would, if viewed from a public health perspective, surely give uspause.17 Overreactive tactics can actually breed new cancer cells that clonethemselves more rapidly. (Cancer has an interesting relation to autoim-munity, since it is about the bodys inability to recognize a destructive cellstructure as alien. The cancer cells are the bodys own cells; their DNA line-age is indistinguishable from the host body. So the immune system sleepsthrough the attack by the bodys own cells). The best strategy is highly tar-geted and intelligent intelligence, coupled with judicious and judicial pro-cedures, not the black-ops stormtroopers, private armies of independent



18. MarshallMcLuhan,UnderstandingMedia: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge,Mass.,1994), p. 3.

19. It was conjectured that the short gap between the rst and second impact on the TwinTowers was calculated to maximizemedia coverage, since it was obvious that every video cameraat the center of the globalmedia systemwould be trained on theWorld Trade Center immediatelyafter the initial strike.

contractors, and hooded torturers that have sprung from the Bush fanta-syland of the war on terror, but inltrators who can simulate the enemy,who speak his language, understand, sympathizewho can clone them-selves as friends of the terrorists. In other words, to some extent thiswould involve shifting the responsibility for dealing with international ter-rorism to the Islamic world, to its internal traditions of justice, its social andpolitical networks, its established, legitimate police and military forces, itstendencies tomodernization and secularization, as well as its deep religiouscommitment to peace and justice. U.S. military power would be kept inreserve for emergencies, humanitarian crises, and other limited-scale in-terventions.Outright preemptivewar, invasion, andoccupationofa foreigncountry that had not attacked us would be prettymuch out of the question.Military adventures in regime change, democratization at gunpoint,wouldbe low on the agenda.

If we listen to it, then, our immune system is whispering hints tous.Thatis, it is passing on a lesson to the nervous system, which is the other bodilysystem that can learn from experience. Not only that, the nervous systemcan accelerate its learning process with self-conscious reection, critique,the preservation of memory and history. Immunity is a form of cellularmemory; the body learns by experience how to ghtmeasles, and it doesntforget. The most dangerous threat to the immune system, then, is amnesia,the forgetting of what it has learned: forgetting, for instance, that todaysterrorists (al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden) were yesterdays allies, trained asantibodies against Soviet military power in Afghanistan; forgetting, evenmore dangerously, that yesterdays terrorists are almost invariably tomor-rows heroes of national liberation and that moral absolutes are not justuseless but positively dangerous in any counterterrorist strategy.

Unfortunately, what Marshall McLuhan called the central nervous sys-tem of the social body,18 what Derrida calls the technoeconomic powerof the media (PTT, p. 108), has been traumatized by an imagethe spec-tacle, the word, above all the number as enigmatic name: 9/11. This image,the spectacle of destruction of the Twin Towers, has been cloned repeatedlyin the collective global nervous system.19 The mediatizing of the event was,in fact, its whole point, as Derrida writes:



20. See the Uncle Osama recruiting poster that appeared in theNew York Times, calling on allpatriotic Americans to invade Iraq, a bit of irony that was lost on the Bush administration,whichdid exactly what al Qaeda wanted. See also Richard A. Clarke,Against All Enemies: Inside AmericasWar on Terror (New York, 2004) for a discussion by the head of U.S. counterterrorismunder fourdierent presidencies of the folly of the war in Iraq as a response to terror.

What would September 11 have been without television? . . . Maxi-mummedia coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators ofSeptember 11, the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the vic-tims, wanted to declare war on terrorism. . . . More than the destruc-tion of the Twin Towers or the attack on the Pentagon,more than thekilling of thousands of people, the real terror consisted of and, in fact,began by exposing and exploiting . . . the image of this terror by the tar-get itself. [PTT, p. 108]

In short, the attack was not immediately on the immune system but onthe nervous system. And it was carried out by a fabricated, produced image,an impression or spectacle staged for the worlds cameras by the terrorists,exploited by a political faction to declare an indenite state of emergency,of exemptionthat is, immunityfrom all the normal niceties of civil lib-erties and international law, not to mention from all the legitimate, well-established institutions of its own immune andnervous systems in the formof its own intelligence services, those diplomatic and military experts andscholars who actually know something about the nature of the threat.Whathas been called a faith-based foreign policy was the perfect twin of thespectre of a faith-based terror. One fanatic deserves, begets another, andUncle Sam is cloned as Uncle Osama.20 Serious medical research into hu-man cloning is banned by a faith-based science policy at one with the faith-based foreign policy that clones terror by declaring a war on it.

When will it become clear that terrorism might be better framed as apublic health issue, involving a grasp of biocultural systems and their ecol-ogies? It is the nervousness of the nervous system that is producing theautoimmunity of the immune system. This is standard medical wisdomabout the relation of these two systems. When the nervous system is in astate of panic, anxiety, depression, or, evenworse, psychosis, generatinghal-lucinations and paranoid fantasies, the immune system has a tendency torespond inappropriately as well. What is the cure? Derridas answer maysurprise those who write him o as an obscurantist or nihilist:

It is once again a question of the Enlightenment, that is, of access toReason in a certain public space, though this time in conditions thattechnoscience and economic or telemedia globalization have thor-oughly transformed. . . . If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors,



21. Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, trans.Mary Quaintance,inDeconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and DavidGray Carlson (New York, 1992), p. 13.

22. SeeWalter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, in Reections: Essays, Aphorisms,AutobiographicalWritings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1977), p. 277, and Derrida, Forceof Law.

artists, and journalists do not, before all else, stand up together againstsuch violence, their abdicationwill be at once irresponsible and sui-cidal. [PTT, p. 125]

Derrida invoking the Enlightenment? This will only surprise those whoforget that it was the Enlightenment and the Goddess of Reason that pre-sided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Reason is onthe side of both terror and counterterror. This insight is crucial to the un-derstanding of deconstruction as a rational operation, one that traces thefault lines in any system or structure.

Which leads us to a nal thought on the image of autoimmunity thatcannot be resisted any longer. Is it the case that deconstruction itself is aspecies of autoimmunity? That is, in purely textual terms, is the tendencyof the law, ofwriting, of texts, and of any systemor totality,whetherpoliticalor institutional or cultural, to deconstruct at some point, whether or not adeconstructor comes along to hasten the process? Is this symptomatic of ahidden anity between deconstruction and autoimmune disorders? Der-rida places deconstruction on the side of justice, of the undeconstructibledemand, desire, and need for some notion of a justice to come.

Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not de-constructible. Nomore than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists.Deconstruction is justice. It is perhaps because law . . . is constructible,in a sense that goes beyond the opposition between convention and na-ture, it is perhaps insofar as it goes beyond this opposition that it is con-structible and so deconstructible.21

Justice and deconstruction are notKantian regulative ideals, and theyarenot teleological horizons for which we might plan in some projected fu-turity. They are what arrives or simply what happens. Derrida sometimescompares deconstruction to an earthquake, a violent disruption in a systemthat is, as it were, built into the system, its structure of checks and balances,its normativities and symmetries. There is no method of deconstruction;the deconstructor is more like a seismologist who traces the disturbances,locates their origins, describes their qualities. This associates deconstruc-tion with Walter Benjamins discussion of what might be called natural vi-olence, which is to say, it is not a violence that concerns us in the way thatpolitical or judicial violence does.22



23. Derrida andMaurizio Ferraris,A Taste for the Secret, trans. GiacomoDonis, ed. Donis andDavidWebb (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 5152.

24. See Derridas comment where he points out that members of the Resistance were regularlytreated as terrorists by the Nazis and the Vichy collaborators (PTT, p. 109).

There are some moments, however, when Derrida grants a bit moreagency to the deconstructor:

When I was very youngand until quite recentlyI used to project alm inmymind of someone who, by night, plants bombs on the rail-way: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action de-vice and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from adistance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phan-tasmic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations,which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-actionmechanism,devices that all of a sudden put a transit route out of commission,mak-ing the enemys movementsmore hazardous. But the friend, too, willhave to live and think dierently, know where hes going, tread lightly.23

How seriously are we to take this fantasy, drawn from the lore of theFrench Resistance heroically ghting the German occupation?24 And is itunfair to see that it is precisely a form of terrorism? (That was certainly theword used by the Germans to denounce the Resistance.) I can imagine thecries of protest at the very suggestion that Derrida and deconstruction arein any sense alignedwith terrorism, but I do not think that simpledisavowalis going to be adequate. Terror has become so thoroughly reied and re-duced to an ideological slogan, a synonym for absolute evil, that it has be-come impossible to think clearly about it. And, in fact, I think it evenstymied the fabulous powers of the great deconstructor himself. Consider,for instance, Derridas nal remarks that allow him to condemn the ter-rorism of bin Laden, despite his acute awareness that state terrorism andsystemic terrorism are rampant in the world system today:

What appears to me unacceptable in the strategy . . . of the binLaden eect is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, thedisrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapital-ist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism.No, it is, aboveall, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no futureand, in my view, have no future. . . . That is why, in this unleashing of vi-olence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose ina binary situation, well, I would. [PTT, p. 113]

But two objections come to mind here. The rst is simply that the ter-rorists do, in fact, envision a future, one in which the U.S. would leave the



25. Derrida, Force of Law, p. 38.

Middle East, wouldwithdrawall its forces,military, economic, andpolitical,making room for the revival of an Islamic kingdom of God, a caliphate inwhich justice (by their lights) would prevail and become identical with thelaw.Wemight not like this future, but there is no denying that it is a possiblefuture, one we must nd ways to prevent and one that has been made allthe more likely by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Derridas as-sertion that bin Ladenism has no future is thus, not just empiricallywrong,but the projection of a nihilism, a hollowness onto the gure of the enemythat is precisely the operation that mysties that gure as an idol of themind, a hollow signier to which any absolute can be attributed.

The second objection is drawn from Derridas own account of revolu-tionary violence as that which simultaneously violates the law and inau-gurates a new legal order in an act of founding violence. Derrida asks ofthese revolutionary tactics:

Can what we are doing here resemble a general strike or a revolution,with regard tomodels, structures but alsomodes of readability of politi-cal action? Is that what deconstruction is? Is it a general strike or a strat-egy of rupture? Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that it assumes the right tocontest, and not only theoretically, constitutional protocols, the verycharter that governs reading in our culture and especially in the acad-emy. No, at least to the extent that it is in the academy that it has beendeveloped (and lets not forget, if we do not wish to sink into ridiculeand indecency, that we are comfortably installed here on Fifth Ave-nueonly a few blocks away from the inferno of injustice).25

Derridas disclaimer strikes me as both a refreshing moment of realism,with a due sense of proportion, and at the same time a straightforward ad-mission that, yes, deconstruction is strictly analogous to the upheaval ofdivine or mythic violence that erupts like a volcano within any system,whether textual or political, and that may lead on to a new order of readingor of legality and political order to come. But that order to come will, if Iunderstand him correctly, never arrive as justice itself (though it will invokea justice to come at every moment), but only as a new order of law, a newhorizon of interpretation. That is why justice, like deconstruction, like au-toimmunity, like divine violence and terror itself, are not regulative idealsor horizons of possibility that can be foreseen. They are precisely the im-possible, the madness of the law, and the law of madness. This also makesthem structurally, formally indistinguishable from the terror of thebinLad-ens, even in its imputed lack of opening to futurity. The dierence, in fact,



26. Derrida describes the violent entrance of the other in the course of history, as themoment of justice . . . foreign to justness or the norm of adaptation (Derrida and BernardStiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek [Cambridge, 2002],p. 9).

27. See Les Roberts et al., Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster SampleSurvey, Lancet, 20 Nov. 2004, p. 1861.

28. See Said, Beginnings: Intention andMethod (New York, 1985).29. SeeW. J. T. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, in Edward Said:

Continuing the Conversation, ed. Homi Bhabha andMitchell (Chicago, 2005), p. 108.

is more like that of Benjamins distinction between mythic violence, whichis foundational and future-orientedand linked to fascismand the di-vine violence of the general strike, which is a near-bloodlessdeconstructionof a political systemperhaps a Velvet Revolution.26

The innocence, in the sense of academic harmlessness or nonviolence,of deconstruction, then, is the only thing that saves it from the charge ofbeing structurally equivalent to autoimmunity and even terrorism. But tosay this is not to accuse deconstruction of anything (except perhaps beinga philosophical and critical project). It is rather tomake terrorismaccessibleto thought in a newway, beyond themoral certainties and the acts ofmyth-ical violence known as the war on terror. The idea that one can implant ademocracy to come by invading and occupying a country, sacricing un-counted thousands of its citizens as collateral damage andholding electionsin which the identity of candidates needs to be kept secret for security rea-sons is precisely an act of mythical violence, driven by a regulative ideal offormal democracy that is an obscene parody of the real thing, much lessany democracy to come that is worthy of the name. It is fascism with aChristian face, an American face. Over three thousand precious souls diedin the destruction of theWorld Trade Center, but over 100,000 equally pre-cious souls have died as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according tothe British medical journal Lancet.27 Where is the memorial to them?

This brings me back to our present horizon of possibilities and impos-sibilities, the state of criticism and theory after Said and Derrida. Ive saidthat they are linked by their utopian sense of a democracy to come and anopenness to possible/impossible futures such as a single democratic stateknown as Israel/Palestine. Saids secular sense of beginnings (as opposedto mythic origins) is, I think, his parallel concept to Derridas lavenir.28

I want to conclude by linking them at the level of method as well, workingagainst the grain of deconstruction as event, and thinking about ways thatwe might go on, if not strictly following rules, in continuing the project ofdeconstruction. Ive argued elsewhere for a procedure in Saids criticalprac-tice I call secular divination, a Nietzschean sounding of the idols withoutdestruction.29 Ive also described this as a pictorial turn, a swerve from lan-



30. Derrida and Ferraris,A Taste for the Secret, p. 89.31. Moses strewing of the ground-up calf on the water is an image of sowing, which already

suggests that the fragments of the calf will regenerate, clone themselves, and spring back to life. SeeArthur J. Jacobson, The Idolatry of Rules:Writing Law According toMoses, inDeconstructionand the Possibility of Justice, pp. 95151. For further discussion of the Golden Calf, see Mitchell,What Do PicturesWant? (Chicago, 2005).

guage to the image, a move that I see as characteristic of Derridas interestinwritinggraphism, rather than linguistics and language, as systemandhis frequent invocation of the imagination, fantasy, and spectrality as thethird that comes unannounced, the stranger or guest who demands, if notunconditional hospitality (the right of residence), then at any rate a rightof visitation.

A word on the subject of the various gures of appearingimage,mor-phe, eidos, and especially phantasm. It seems to me that if . . . we take theword phantasm to mean that which weaves the universal and the indi-vidual together in the image, then we come right back to what we saidearlier . . . about the coming before of the other in the I, i.e. as phan-tasm. But I would not free myself so easily of phantoms, as some peopleall too often say they do (its nothing but a phantom). I think that weare structured by the phantasmic, and in particular that we have aphantasmic relation to the other, and that the phantasmicity of this re-lation cannot be reduced, this pre-originary intervention of the other inme.30

If I read this correctly, Derrida is saying that the image can neither becreated nor destroyed (though perhaps it can and must be deconstructed).It is the other in me, which must be embraced even as a gure of terror (Itake this to be Derridas sense of the risk involved in unconditional hos-pitality). It arrives, appears; it is a gure of appearing and itself an appari-tion, a double presence of absence, a metapicture. The law is what opposesthe image, interdicts and prohibits it, and the rst law of the Abrahamicreligions, the peoples of the book, is the law against the making of gravenimages. The law can be shattered, as Moses shows in his rage at the ap-pearance of the Golden Calf, but the calf cannot be deconstructed in thatway. It must be melted down, annihilated, and then taken in, drunk by therebellious Israelites. This drastic treatment is based in a recognition that theimage cannot be destroyed; it comes back to life, appears again in a spectralform, in the eyes of Moses own words, the vision conveyed by his narra-tive.31

The idols of our time, themonumentalization of 9/11, the fetishistic con-cept of terrorism, the mythic cultural icon of immunity as homeland se-curity, cannot be destroyed either. But they canbe sounded,made todivulgetheir hollowness. They can be melted down and drunk, deconstructed, andsubjected to a secular divination. This will have to do for now.


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