Introduction: War and Its Other

In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, in a discussion of the opposition between “war” and “terrorism,” Jacques Derrida tells Giovanna Borradori that the terms themselves are unstable and have a political history that must be rigorously examined:

Semantic instability, irreducible trouble spots on the borders between concepts, indecision in the very concept of the border: all this must not only be analysed as a speculative disorder, a conceptual chaos or zone of passing turbulence in public or political language. We must also recognise here strategies and relations of force. The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalise (for it is always a question of law) on a national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation.

(Borradori, 2003, p. 105)