Like everyone else, I remember where I was when I heard about “9/11” over the phone; I remember the grain of the voice of the person who gave me the information; I remember the color of the sky at the foot of William the Conqueror’s castle where I was in Caen; I remember the comment my friend added: “It’s war!” » ; I also remember asking myself the question: “How UNITED STATES will they respond to this declaration of war? » We know that they bombed Iraq, which had nothing to do with Bin Laden, and that they destroyed other Muslim countries, including Libya, sparing Saudi Arabia, where the terrorists came from, and Pakistan, where Bin Laden had taken refuge. These wars have claimed millions – yes, millions… – of innocent Muslim victims. You might as well throw fuel on the fire to put out a fire.
It was the start of the first civilizational war of the atomic age. What was at stake in this Third World War was one more act in this old war of religion that Judeo-Christianity and Islam have been waging since the 7th century AD. It was the planetarization of this endless war with the protagonists of Bush’s Bible supporters and Bin Laden’s supporters of the Koran. In other words: the Crusades 2.0. For my part, after 2001, I set to work to write my Treatise on atheology (2005); it was an answer, my answer, to this civilizational question. It was the position of an esthete, if not a philosopher in his office, who proposed a paper response: atheism against religions. I’m not taking anything away from this book, but it lacked practical additions.
Julien Freund is right: if the enemy designates us as his enemy, we have no choice – he will be our enemy
Let us point out in passing that the (great) political philosopher Julien Freund is right: if the enemy designates us as his enemy, we have no choice to be his friend, he will be, because he wanted it, our enemy – unless we love who hates us, which defines a posture as old as the world in politics and which is called: intelligence with the enemy. More briefly said: collaboration – or even: submission. September 11 cuts to the heart of great history the intellectual debate which then opposed Francis Fukuyama to Samuel Huntington. In The end of the story and the last man (1992), Fukuyama asserts that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, marked the end of history and the global triumph of liberalism. The right of the left and the left of the right loved it.
On the contrary, in The clash of civilizations (1996), Huntington affirms that history is not pacified and realized, an old Hegelo-Marxist fantasy, but still ongoing on the principle no longer of the struggle of classes but of the struggle of civilizations. I then had heated conversations with my Germanopratin editor: he defended the end of the story, normal in this district of Paris which prefers ideas to reality; me, the clash of civilizations, normal for a sovereignist. The time of hedonism that was mine then was cooling off while the civilizational time was warming up. As someone else would say, the civilizational house was burning and I was looking elsewhere…
In the last century, I wrote a long text on the life and death of Western civilization. Its title was a formula found in The Drunk Boat : Europe with its ancient parapets. At Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I was strongly advised to forget this text which, if it had been published, would have brought me hell in Paris – hell, that was for later. But I prefer hell in good company to their paradise where we risk finding Epstein. In this commemorative hour, here I am busy writing four volumes, in other words, two thousand pages, to tell the philosophical history of the West – the one against which Bin Laden launched the planes that we know about the Twin Towers. The latest news is that this war is still ongoing.
