"Obfuscation in a time of terror."

What happens to our passion for literature when any "text" qualifies as literature, when theory is elevated above poetry and the critic above the poet, and when literature, interpretation, and theory alike are said to be indeterminate and infinitely malleable? What happens to our respect for philosophy -- the "love of wisdom," as it once was -- when we are told that philosophy has nothing to do with either wisdom or virtue, that what passes for metaphysics is really linguistics, that morality is a form of aesthetics and that the best thing we can do is not to take philosophy seriously?

And what happens to our sense of the past when we are told that there is no past save that which the historian creates; or to our perception of the momentousness of history when we are assured that is is we who give moment to history; or to that most momentous historical event, the Holocaust, when it can be so readily "demystified" and "normalized," "structuralized" and "deconstructed"?

And what happens when we look into the abyss and see no real beasts but only a pale reflection of ourselves -- of our particular race, glass, and gender; or, worse yet, when we see only the metaphorical, rhetorical, mythical, linguistic, semiotic, figurative, fictive simulations of our imaginations? And when, looking at an abyss so remote from reality, we are moved to say, like Trilling's students, "How interesting, how exciting."

Gertrude Himmelfarb
On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society

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EXERCISE: Consider this in relation to a dialogue with Jacques Derrida on the subject of 9/11.