The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror - Softcover

Redfield, Marc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823231240 ISBN 13: 9780823231249

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Redfield is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman; The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism; and The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (Fordham).

Review

/The Rhetoric of Terror/ is a resolutely convincing case for the power
of theory in understanding and contesting the "peculiar speech acts"
that sovereign power has enacted and embodied in response to 9/11 and
the exceptional conditions it has been used to justify. Redfield's deep
commitment to the lessons of Derrida and his knowledge of the major
European philosophical formulations of war and terror from 1789 to the
present enable him to provide an indispensable analysis of what he
eloquently calls "the unruly figurativeness of war". War is a concept
that is hideously real, and one that cannot be left in the hands of
politicians and combatants. Perhaps the importance of theory for
ordinary life has never been greater; no one makes a clearer case than
Redfield for the urgent application of critique to the recent and
current languages of political and military self-accreditation.

(―David Simpson University of California, Davis)

The Rhetoric of Terror exhibits the kind of patience it finds in the literature of testimony: an "endless, scrupulous patience with linguistic deviance and mediation." Marc Redfield unpetrifies the language of emergency, showing us how a single name-date ("9/11") or place-name ("Ground Zero") can function at once as monument, wound, alarm, and oubliette. And in a stunning genealogy of the concept, he recounts how "terror" has haunted both sovereignty and theory from the French Revolution to the present. This is the most wakeful book yet about the war on terror, keeping watch with its subject intently enough to ravel out its many self-divisions and the urgent demands they harbor. (―Paul K. Saint-Amour University of Pennsylvania
Author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination)

A stimulating tour de force, The Rhetoric of Terror provides a brilliant lexicon of central keywords of our recent political life. Redfield's analysis of '9/11,' 'Ground Zero,' 'the war on terror' and other powerful slogans traces the performative paradoxes that have enabled these phrases to do such terrible work. (Martin Harries New York University)

A masterly elaboration of post-structuralist thought on the subject. (―Times Higher Education)

Topics include the attacks as a mediated spectacle. (―The Chronicle of Higher Education)

A very smart and interesting pair of essays reflecting on the cultural significance of 9/11 and the idea of a war on terror. (―Jonathan Culler Cornell University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0823231240
• ISBN 13: 9780823231249
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148