Shortly before 4 p.m. on March 19, 2003, the director of the CIA, George Tenet, met with President George W. Bush and his closest advisors in order to inform them of a new and potentially important discovery. Preparation for the invasion of Iraq had almost been concluded, and the start of military action was at the most days away. Director Tenet informed the president and his staff that the CIA had received reliable and precise information concerning the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi president and many of his senior collaborators were gathered in a villa in southern Baghdad that...

From theOdysseyto the present, a complex and variegated continuity can be found linking the motif and practices of targeting to a certain attitude toward death in what, for want of a better word, I will call the “Western” tradition. In investigating this link, one finds oneself confronted by anaporia, which Derrida describes succinctly in his bookAporias:

It is not enough to recall that there are cultures of death and that from one culture to another, at the crossing of borders, death changes face, meaning, language, or even body…. One must go further: culture itself, culture in...

In the years following the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing unification of Germany, Nietzsche published a series of four essays under the general titleUntimely Observations(1873–76). In the introduction to the second of these, “The Use and Abuse of History,” Nietzsche explains and defends his title: “This observation is also untimely, because what the times [die Zeit, the age] are rightly proud of, its historical cultivation [Bildung], I try to understand here as damage, breakage, and deficiency, because I believe indeed that we are all suffering from a consuming historical fever and at the very least ought to...

In the summer of 2000, Jacques Derrida gave a keynote address to an international congress of psychoanalysts meeting in Paris. The title of his talk was “Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse,” which in the meanwhile has been translated and published in English as “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.”¹ Derrida began his talk by asking a series of questions concerning the relation of psychoanalysis to cruelty:

Let us merely ask ourselves whether, yes or no, what is called “psychoanalysis” does not open up the only way that could allow us, if not to know, if not to think even,...

If Freud’s two essays, written in the midst of the First World War and on the eve of the Second, clearly belong to a single epoch, the military and strategic thinking being elaborated at the start of the twenty-first century would seem, at first sight, at least, to be part of a different world. And yet, however striking and undisputable the differences that separate the two worlds may be, they also set off certain shared concerns, concepts, and paradigms. Not the least of these has to do with a sense of epochal transformation. This situation is complicated by the fact...

As we have seen, in his essay “The Teller” Walter Benjamin employs the figures of the “chain” and the “net” to distinguish the two major ways in which memory weaves tradition out of stories: “Memory establishes the chain [Kette] of tradition that leads from generation to generation [von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht]. It is the muse of epic in the largest sense. As muse, it determines the subspecies of the epic. Among these, the one that takes first place is that which is embodied in the storyteller. It establishes the net that all stories form with one another in the end.”¹...