The Rhetoric of Terror : Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror / Marc Redfield.
Redfield, Marc, author.
2009
HV6432.7 .R435 2009eb
Available Online

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Title The Rhetoric of Terror : Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror / Marc Redfield.
Author Redfield, Marc, author.
ISBN 9780823238583
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823238583
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2009]
Copyright ©2009
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (148 p.)
Item Number 10.1515/9780823238583 doi
Call Number HV6432.7 .R435 2009eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 363.325
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 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 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823231232
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Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Spectral Life and the Rhetoric of Terror
PART I. Virtual Trauma
1. September 11
2. Ground Zero
3. Like A Movie
4. The Gigantic
5. World Trade Center and United 93
6. Virtual Trauma and True Mourning
PART II. War on Terror
1. The Sovereign and the Terrorist
2. Sovereignty at War
3. Terror
4. Terror in Letters
5. Romanticism and the War on Terror
6. Toward Perpetual Peace
Notes
Index

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