Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, excerpt:

“‘Many assumptions about politics were destroyed along with the World Trade Center, and Borradori seized the opportunity to ask Habermas and Derrida how their theories fared. These men represent two central strands of European philosophy—the one building on Enlightenment notions of universal rationality, the other suspicious of the commitments often hidden in its language. . . . But Habermas sees the outbreak of terror mainly as a failure of communications, and Derrida sees it above all as a failure to develop a concept of world hospitality to replace what he thinks is the outmoded Christian notion of a toleration that is really only charity. Despite their theoretical convictions, they seem here to see the problems more as philosophical than as a failure to integrate economics and the social sciences or develop a strategy against misery and poverty.”

And: The mixed-up debate over the new European patriotism:

“The Iraq War has made for some strange bedfellows, in philosophy no less than in politics. On May 31, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida issued a joint declaration, ”After the War: The Rebirth of Europe,” in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and France’s La Libration. In it, the great theoretician of communication and consensus and the doyen of deconstruction put aside their considerable intellectual differences to call for a unified European response ”to balance out the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.” But what they were really after was the creation of ”a European identity,” a sense of patriotism to rival that which, for better or worse, has dominated the United States since Sept. 11.” Boston Globe