"I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act"
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Habermas is doing something more surgical than condemning 9/11: he’s refusing a particular kind of explanation before it can even dress itself up as sophistication. “I cannot imagine a context” is not a failure of imagination; it’s a boundary-setting move. For a thinker whose life’s work revolves around the ethics of public reason, this is a preemptive strike against the impulse to translate atrocity into legible politics.
The phrasing matters. He doesn’t just call the attacks evil; he calls them a “monstrous crime,” pushing them into the register of criminality rather than warfare, strategy, or “resistance.” That choice blocks a familiar rhetorical pipeline: grievances become causes, causes become context, context becomes justification. Habermas anticipates the slippery slope in the very words “understandable” and “comprehensible,” which can sound innocent - the language of analysis - but often smuggles in a moral softening. He’s warning that comprehension can become complicity, or at least complacency.
The subtext is a critique of Western intellectual temptation after 9/11: to prove one’s seriousness by locating the hidden rationality of terror, to treat mass murder as a grim but coherent “message” within global politics. Habermas doesn’t deny that contexts exist (history always does); he denies that any context can convert the act into a political deed we can recognize as such. Politics, in his normative universe, requires a claim that could be addressed in discourse. Indiscriminate slaughter is the anti-argument: it ends conversation by making civilians the medium.
The phrasing matters. He doesn’t just call the attacks evil; he calls them a “monstrous crime,” pushing them into the register of criminality rather than warfare, strategy, or “resistance.” That choice blocks a familiar rhetorical pipeline: grievances become causes, causes become context, context becomes justification. Habermas anticipates the slippery slope in the very words “understandable” and “comprehensible,” which can sound innocent - the language of analysis - but often smuggles in a moral softening. He’s warning that comprehension can become complicity, or at least complacency.
The subtext is a critique of Western intellectual temptation after 9/11: to prove one’s seriousness by locating the hidden rationality of terror, to treat mass murder as a grim but coherent “message” within global politics. Habermas doesn’t deny that contexts exist (history always does); he denies that any context can convert the act into a political deed we can recognize as such. Politics, in his normative universe, requires a claim that could be addressed in discourse. Indiscriminate slaughter is the anti-argument: it ends conversation by making civilians the medium.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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