“I became interested in the way our culture felt the desperate need to represent 9/11 but also to ward off representations of 9/11. . . . From the beginning, you find strictures against photographing the site, but you will also find a vast number of photographs, even photographs of people taking photographs.”—Mark Redfield

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The terrorist attacks that day, 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.

To read more about Marc Redfield and his thoughts on 9/11, visit Today at Brown.

To learn more about the book, you can listen to a podcast by Mark Redfield or watch a short video clip from the author.

“I became interested in the way our culture felt the desperate need to represent 9/11 but also to ward off representations of 9/11. . . . From the beginning, you find strictures against photographing the site, but you will also find a vast number of photographs, even photographs of people taking photographs.”—Mark Redfield

This past Saturday marked the ninth anniversary of 9/11. The terrorist attacks that day, 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.

To read more about Marc Redfield and his thoughts on 9/11, visit Today at Brown.

In The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror, Marc Redfield examines the cultural impact of terrorism and what it means when such shocking acts of violence saturate our media and society. Redfield astutely blends the philosophy of Jacques Derrida with the modern concepts of “virtual terror” and the “war on terror.”

Forthcoming in August is Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic. Jacques Lezra examines political philosophy in a contemporary climate, musing on questions such as how can social unity be achieved in a divergent culture? If so, does such unity require certain universal laws? What does democracy mean in a culture of globalization, terrorism, and fundamentalism? In contemplating these questions, Lezra gets to the root of what our politics really mean in our modern world. 

This week’s issue of Publisher’s Weekly features a review of the new collection Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, forthcoming from Fordham Press in January.

Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics Edited by Roger Berkowitz, Thomas Keenan and Jeffrey Katz. Fordham Univ., $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-8232-3076-1
Artfully balancing conceptual precision and editorial care with a deep sense of urgency, this volume of essays on one of the 20th century’s great theorists of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism offers a stimulating examination of Arendt’s political and philosophical writings. The pieces analyze the sociopolitical ramifications of her life as well as more focused discussions of key topics in the social and the political realms. Cathy Caruth offers an exemplary reading of the relationship between the Pentagon Papers and Arendt’s notion of the modern political lie that attempts not simply to cover over mistakes but to replace reality entirely by fabricating new histories. Uday Mehta gives a fascinating outline of Arendt’s views on politics and terror, while Christopher Hitchens offers some brief, idiosyncratic reflections on anti-Semitism. Contributors return repeatedly to Arendt’s 1963 coverage of the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. The essays lack a consensus on Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” but it is precisely the rich variety of interpretations together with a wonderful selection of images from her personal library that make the collection so compelling. (Jan.)