Giovanna Borradori

Two great interviews with two of the smartest people alive. One thing I really liked about this book was how well Giovanna Borradori was able to put Derrida's and Habermas's thoughts from her interviews with them into the context of their larger bodies of work. The interviews were not as heady and difficult as the two philosophers' other writings, and Borradori's accounts of their overall theories are really accessible.

This book helped me think about the events of 9/11 a great deal, though show more perhaps Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" was a more entertaining and ethically-engaging book. show less

"To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, that "something" comes or happens for the first and last time. -- Jacques Derrida

There were measures of apprehension as I approached this book. Thankfully they proved unfounded. This text is comprised of two interviews and three essays by Giovanna Borradori: an introduction followed by an response to each interview with a philosopher.

I was struck by Habermas dwelling on the nature of the Event, as it were, how he pondered the difference show more between his own experience viewing such (along with the rest of the world) on television and those who viewed such from the streets and rooftops around the crash site.

Derrida disagrees with the nature of it being an Event, singular and epoch evocative. I suppose the latter point is what I truly appreciated here. Richard Rorty devoted a number of essays (which I'm presently reading) attempting to establish that Derrida should be approached primarily as a comic writer. I'll avoid that issue for the present and assert that the tone here is appropriately somber. My god, is it ever stimulating! The concepts of Tolerance and Hospitality are masticated slowly. With further deliberation Derrida delves into Kant and muses paradoxical.

I should read more Habermas. I've known that for years. Much like Sanjit Ray, this will need to wait for a better time. show less

(These five stars are for Derrida, not Habermas)

Habermas and Derrida doesn't get much better than this