As the bookstore entered its third decade, 9/11 threw the whole world into a cataclysmic shock. All of a sudden, shaken to its foundations, the United States faced not only one of the greatest disasters in its history, but also a newly fractured world.
As if to offer a glimmer of hope, The New Yorker closed its first post-9/11 issue, dated September 24, 2001, with the poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,”1 in which the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entreats us to remember the beauty of the living world: “over the earth’s scars / . . . / and the gentle light that stays and vanishes / and returns.”
Some nine months later, on June 2002, Adam Zagajewski was at the Village Voice to launch his new anthology Without End: New and Selected Poems. He opened the evening with his New Yorker poem, reciting it with a slight Polish intonation in his voice that symbolically seemed to convey his country’s and Europe’s empathy for America in the throes of her tragedy.
Jacques Derrida, Beverley Bie Brahic, and Hélène Cixous, March 17, 2004. © Laurence Moréchand
Almost two years afterwards, on March 17, 2004, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida appeared at our bookstore to speak about his reflections on the World Trade Center attacks recently published in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.2
A compelling, even stunning figure in France, Derrida deconstructed 9/11 for his packed bilingual audience, who hung onto every word. He asked the audience to imagine if “such an act—the worst terrorist attack of all times—this spectacular destruction of two towers and the theatrical but invisible deaths of thousands of people in just a few seconds” could be viewed just as “a terrible crime, a pain without measure . . . it won’t happen again, it’s over.” “No, of course, on the contrary, “ he insisted, speaking in English, “there is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility . . . of the worst to come,” which he saw as “anonymous forces . . . absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable, bloodless nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks, but also informational networks on which the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a great nation depends.”
Six months after his unforgettable three-hour exchange with his Village Voice public, Derrida passed away. Gathered to honor his memory, a group of scholars reappraised the philosopher’s deconstruction concept “as a new philosophy of Enlightenment adapted to our contemporary world, groping for a new light to come.”3
On the opposite side of the planet, the Indian philosopher Nishant Irudayadason viewed Derrida’s work as a search to transcend all possible and visible horizons, or as “thinking a world without boundaries.”4
This title perfectly describes the world literatures that flourished at a time when terrorism seemed to tempt more than one to retreat into oneself. By contrast, these literatures invited the readers to look beyond their own horizons in order to embark on a literary journey that was at once geographical, historical, cultural, and mind-broadening.