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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 absolu

Author

Marc Redfield

Publisher

New York: Fordham University Press

Published

2009

Language

EN

ISBN

9780823238583

Subjects

Literary Criticism, History, Social Science