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Embodying terror: reading terrorism with Luce Irigaray

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posted on 2023-06-08, 13:55 authored by Liz Sage
In the wake of the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001, two seemingly disparate ideas gained popular and academic currency. On the one hand, the growing cultural anxiety about the power of the image finally seemed to have been justified, as the unprecedented scale of the attacks, combined with their unprecedented coverage, left a global audience with the impression that the purpose of the attacks was precisely the production of such spectacular images. Jean Baudrillard was not alone when he argued in The Spirit of Terrorism that the collapse of the World Trade Center did not herald ‘a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in an allegedly virtual universe’, but instead demonstrated that ‘the spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us’ (pp. 28, 30). For Baudrillard, Žižek and others, ‘it is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality’ (Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 16). According to these thinkers and many others, the horrific images produced on that day ushered in the totalitarianism of the image, and the death of reality: ‘for reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost’ as the image becomes that which shapes reality, rather than records or represents reality (Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 28).

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Page range

222-236

Pages

332.0

Book title

Building a new world: Luce Irigaray: teaching II

ISBN

9781137453013

Series

Palgrave studies in postmetaphysical thought

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray

Legacy Posted Date

2017-03-22

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