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The Rhetoric of Terror - Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Paperback)
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The Rhetoric of Terror - Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Paperback)
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The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well
as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the
American idiom "9/11": a bare name-date conveying both a trauma
(the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In
the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of
Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of "virtual trauma" to
describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and
relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once
terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented
self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11
in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and
United 93. In the second half of the book, Redfield examines the
historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of "war
on terror." Redfield argues that the declaration of war on terror
is the exemplary postmodern sovereign speech act: it unleashes war
as terror and terror as war, while remaining a crazed, even in a
certain sense fictional performative utterance. Only a
pseudosovereign-the executive officer of the world's
superpower-could have declared this absolute, phantasmatic, yet
terribly damaging war. Though politicized terror and absolute war
have their roots in the French Revolution and the emergence of the
modern nation-state, Redfield suggests that the idea of a war on
terror relays the complex, spectral afterlife of sovereignty in an
era of biopower, global capital, and telecommunication. A moving,
wide-ranging, and rigorous meditation on the cultural tragedy of
our era, The Rhetoric of Terror also unfolds as an act of mourning
for Jacques Derrida. Derrida's groundbreaking philosophical
analysis of iterability-iterability as the exposure to repetition
with a difference elsewhere that makes all technics, signification,
and psychic life possible-helps us understand why questions of
mediation and aesthetics so rapidly become so fraught in our
culture; why efforts to repress our essential political, psychic,
and ontological vulnerability generate recursive spasms of
violence; why ethical living-together involves uninsurable acts of
hospitality. The Rhetoric of Terror closes with an affirmation of
eirenic cosmopolitanism.
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