whether earthquake or electricity failure or the hoary Millennium Bug

We are not dealing now with ‘globalisation’ as an unfinished project’ but with a true ‘dialectics of globalisation’: the segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalisation.

We are thus caught in a Kantian antinomy (though it would be too obscene to call this ‘the antinomy of Holocaust reason’): while any positive reference to the Holocaust amounts to its instrumentalisation, the reduction of any reference to the Holocaust to such an instrumentalisation (i.e. the imposition of total silence about the Holocaust in political discourse) is no less unacceptable.

along the lines of Kant’s notion of the negative use of reason as the only legitimate one when we are dealing with noumenal objects, one should limit its use to a negative mode

The basic meaning of jihad in Islam is not war against the external enemy, but the effort of inner purification.

Marx’s analysis of the political imbroglio of the French Revolution of 1848 comes to mind.

Isn’t one of the topoi of Western liberalism the elevation of the Other as leading a life that is more harmonious, organic, less competitive, and aiming at cooperation rather than domination?

One is tempted here to use that old Levi-Straussian term ‘symbolic efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses an actual efficiency of its own.

no longer Wagner as the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur

Is there a whole which can teleologically justify and thus redeem or sublate an event such as the Holocaust?