The Phantom of Liberty: Mo(der)nism and Postcolonial Imaginations in India

On May 31, 2003, Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, two of the greatest living European philosophers at that time, issued a joint declaration, in some European newspapers. It was entitled “After the War: The Rebirth of Europe.” The context was the political protests in various European cities against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on the one hand and the support of various European leaders (Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, and Silvio Berlusconi among others) to the U.S. aggression on the other hand. It called upon “European peoples” to recognize and celebrate “four distinctively European achievements: the separation of church and state, the faith in the power of politics and a relatively benign state to ameliorate the impact of capitalism, the ethos of solidarity in the struggle for social justice, and the high esteem accorded to international law and the rights of the individual” (Heffernan 2005, p. 573). This document was mainly written by Habermas and only endorsed by Derrida. However, in a conversation with Giovanna Borradori on the September 11 attacks and global terrorism, Derrida made the following statement: I say this without any Eurocentrism … But I persist in using this name “Europe,” even if in quotation marks, because, in the long and patient deconstruction required for the transformation to come, the experience Europe inaugurated at the time of the Enlightenment in the relationship between the political and the theological or, rather, the religious, though still uneven, unfulfilled, relative, and complex, will have left in European political space absolutely original marks with regard to religious doctrine … Such marks can be found neither in the Arab world nor in the Muslim world, nor in the Far East, nor even … in American democracy, in what in fact governs not the principles but the predominant reality of American political culture.1