Reflections on 9-11

By Tatsuro Fujikura


Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his essay published in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, wrote that a "world without alternatives needs self-criticism as a condition of survival and decency." This is what cultural critic Slavoj Zizek also urges, in his booklet written in the wake of the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001, in the weeks leading up to the initiation of the asymmetric war led by the US against Afghanistan. Of the two main stories that emerged after September 11, the American patriotic narrative and the Leftist narrative, Zizek says, "both are worse, as Stalin would have put it." The former narrative the American innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride is "of course, vain." However, the Leftist narrative "the US got what they deserved, what they were doing for decades to others" was no better. Indeed, the predominant reaction of European and American Leftists was "nothing less than scandalous." "The moment one thinks [as some Leftists apparently did] in terms of 'yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but one should not fully soliderize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism' the ethical catastrophe is already here." Of course, Zizek urges, the only appropriate ethical stance is "the unconditional solidarity with ALL victims - the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable." The ritualistic chant by the Leftists of the old mantra "Give peace a chance! War does not stop violence!" in the weeks after the bombing belied the utter failure of the Left to engage in the concrete analysis of the new complex situation and to propose its own interpretation of the events.

On his part, Zizek, a cultural theorist known among other things for his study of films employing psychoanalytic concepts, starts his booklet on the WTC bombings with a discussion of the observation made by Alain Badiou that "passion of the Real" constitutes the key feature of the 20th century. The "passion of the Real" refers to the pursuit of "the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality the Real in its extreme violence as the price paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality." The examples of this passion include the celebration of the face to face combat during the World War I as "the authentic intersubjective encounter" and, in the realm of sexuality, Nagisa Oshima's film In the Realm of the Senses (1976) where the couple's love relationship is "radicalized into mutual torture till death." Turning his eyes on Hollywood films, Zizek writes, "The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake." A recent example of the films based on this premise was The Truman Show (1998) starring Jim Carry. The Matrix (1999) starring Keanu Reeves shares the basic logic: the reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one generated and coordinated by a mega-computer. When the hero awakens to the "real reality" of the world after a global war, the resistance leader Morpheus utters the greeting "Welcome to the desert of the real"" A long series of disaster movies, from Escape from New York (1981) to Independence Day (1996), indicate that such catastrophic destruction of everyday reality has long been the object of American fantasy. And when, on September 11, the disaster finally struck for real, the overwhelming reaction to the scene of the WTC collapse was that it looked "just like what you see in the movies." When, the Real (i.e., the brutal materiality beneath and beyond all appearances) finally happened it came precisely in the form of semblance, "just like in the movies." (As may be clear from the above, in the psychoanalytic perspective employed here, the Real can never be experienced as such: Ultimately, the Real is another name for the Void.)

In Zizek's view, the shattering impact that bombings had on those in the 'developed world' can only be accounted for against the background of the reign of 'virtual capitalism' which divides digitalized First World from the Third World's 'desert of the Real': "It is the awareness that we live in an insulated universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction. In this paranoiac perspective, the terrorists are turned into an irrational abstract agency - subtracted from the concrete socio-ideological network which gave birth to it." This abstraction is evident in the official American discourse on terrorism, where every particular entity is evoked only in a negative way: "the terrorists betray the true spirit of Islam, they do not express the interests and hopes of the poor Arab masses ." Consequently, in this discourse, Osama bin Laden, comes to resemble, more than any real human being, "Ernst Savro Blofeld, the master criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global destruction."

Against such discourses that postulate Good versus Evil, Civilization versus Barbarism, Democracy versus Fundamentalism, Zizek urges us to resort to the dialectic category of 'totality'. The so-called 'international terror network', as well as all the governmental regimes in the First and Third Worlds, are all part of the single field, that of today's global capitalist universe. Contemporary 'terrors' are indeed effected through a complex and concrete web of socio-ideological processes and agencies, a fact obscured by the abstract dualistic constructions. Of such traumatic event as the attacks on September 11, Zizek writes, there can be two kinds of reaction. One is a kind of 'acting out', resorting to barbaric violence, in a desperate attempt to fill the gap in the (previously comfortable) symbolic universe punctured by the traumatic event. The other, more mature response is to render thematic the root causes (including the paranoiac fantasy described above) of such trauma, and to seek to act in a rational way, a way that would reduce the amount of further injuries to the self AND to the others.

Zizek's appeal, needless to say, is relevant not just for those who live in America or Europe. His call for rational reflection and action in the face of violent turmoil, is relevant to each of us who are susceptible to accepting whether as 'necessary evil' or simply out of resignation about 'the way the world is' excessive, unjust, or irrational violence inflicted on others, whether in the name of 'War against Terrorism' or otherwise.