The rhetoric of terror : reflections on 9/11 and the war on terror /
"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 essa...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Fordham University Press,
2009.
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| Series: | Book collections on Project MUSE.
UPCC book collections on Project MUSE. Archive Political Science and Policy Studies Foundation. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to this title online (unlimited users allowed) |
| Summary: | "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 of this book, the author 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, the author examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of war on terror. He 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, the author 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."--Publisher's abstract. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (viii, 136 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780823247196 0823247198 9780823238583 082323858X 9780823231256 0823231259 |