The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror
The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror
Marc Redfield
Copyright Date: 2009
Published by: Fordham University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g
Pages: 148
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x071g
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Book Info
The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror
Book Description:

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 traumato 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.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-4719-6
Subjects: Political Science
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.2
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. vii-x)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.3
  4. Introduction: Spectral Life and the Rhetoric of Terror
    Introduction: Spectral Life and the Rhetoric of Terror (pp. 1-10)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.4

    Surely there could not be, in our time, a book about 9/11 that did not originate in shock. Even the confession of a conspirator, one hypothesizes, would record somehow in its texture the impact of an event outstripping the imaginings of its perpetrators—even though one easily imagines the perpetrators imagining the attacks as precisely the kind of cinematic spectacle they went on to achieve. The shock of the attacks, inseparable from spectacle but irreducible to it, was registered (and thus partly absorbed) by the emergence of a name for this event: a bare name-date, “September 11,” “9/11.” Very quickly...

  5. PART I Virtual Trauma
    PART I Virtual Trauma (pp. 11-48)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.5

    Although no event releases its full historical dimensions to those who endure it, the fact that the terrorist attacks of September 11 left a mark on ordinary language offers a hint of their historical force. A society of spectacle is necessarily an intensely if narrowly verbal society, and it is not just as an array of images but above all as a name that “September 11” has become part of everyday American cultural life. The photographs and video recordings remain on call in the archive, forever ready to reappear in the media or to be accessed via the Internet, but...

  6. PART II War on Terror
    PART II War on Terror (pp. 49-96)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.6

    Who speaks, and in what mode, when war is declared on terror? What are the conditions of possibility for this speech act; what clumps of historical context cling to it? To what performative felicity could it aspire? Has such a declaration of war indeed ever occurred; could it ever occur or, for that matter, not occur? Since September 11, 2001, the world has been enduring the consequences of what the global media declares—sometimes skeptically, and often disapprovingly—to be a war declared by the United States on terror, yet in many ways it is hard to imagine a speech...

  7. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 97-132)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.7
  8. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 133-136)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x071g.8
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