Onfray: “The war that began on 11 September is still ongoing”

Like everyone else, I remember exactly where I was when I heard about 9/11 on the phone. I remember the tone of voice of the person who gave me the news; I remember the colour of the sky at the foot of William the Conqueror’s castle, where I was in Caen; I remember the comment my friend added: ‘It’s war!’, writes the philosopher Michel Onfray in the Journal du dimanche. “It was the start of the first ‘war of civilisations’ of the atomic age. What was at stake in this Third World War was yet another chapter in that age-old religious war that Judeo-Christianity and Islam have been waging since the 7th century AD. It was the globalisation of this endless war, with the protagonists being the supporters of Bush’s Bible and the partisans of Bin Laden’s Koran. In other words: the Crusades 2.0. For my part, after 2001, I set to work drafting my ‘Treatise on Atheology’; it was a response – my response – to this clash of civilisations. It was the stance of an aesthete, if not a philosopher in his study, proposing a written rebuttal: atheism versus religions. I take nothing away from that book, but it lacked some practical elements. Let us note in passing that the (great) political philosopher Julien Freund is right: if the enemy designates us as his enemy, we have no choice but to be his enemies; he will, because he so willed it, be our enemy – unless we love those who hate us, which defines a stance as old as the hills in politics and which is called: collusion with the enemy. To put it more succinctly: collaboration or submission. 11 September cuts right to the heart of the intellectual debate that was then pitting Francis Fukuyama against Samuel Huntington.

In ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, Fukuyama asserts that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, marks the end of history and the global triumph of liberalism. The right-wing left and the left-wing right lauded it. Conversely, in "The Clash of Civilisations", Huntington argues that history is not pacified and fulfilled – an old Hegelian-Marxist fantasy – but is always unfolding, based no longer on the principle of class struggle but on that of the clash of civilisations. At the time, I had stormy conversations with my publisher in Saint-Germain-des-Prés: he defended the end of history – a typical stance in that Parisian neighbourhood which favours ideas over reality; I, on the other hand, defended the clash of civilisations – a typical stance for a sovereignist. The hedonistic era that had been mine at the time was cooling off, while the era of civilisation was heating up. As someone else might put it, the house of civilisation was burning and I was looking the other way. In the last century, I had written a long essay on the life and death of Western civilisation. It was entitled ‘Europe on the Brink’. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I was strongly advised to forget that text, which, had it been published, would have earned me hell in Paris – hell, that was for later. However, I prefer hell in good company to their paradise, where one risks encountering Epstein. At this time of remembrance, I am busy compiling four volumes—two thousand pages—to recount the philosophical history of the West, the very West against which Bin Laden launched aircraft into the Twin Towers. According to the latest reports, this war is still raging.”