'Continuum of the Unsayable and the Unspeakable'
This paper centres round two images which span the decade at issue: in one, US citizens witness the WTC attack; in the other, US executives witness the killing of Bin Laden. The first image contains a haunting and prescient representation of the unsayable and unspeakable, a version of which was to return so surprisingly and powerfully in the second image ten years later. In interview with Giovanna Borradori in 2003, Jacques Derrida proposed that there exists a double trauma in acts of terror such as those now metonymically held within the designation ‘September 11’. The attack on the WTC and the Pentagon involved, firstly and most obviously, the traumatising of commonly held interpretations of US landmass invulnerability made real by the physical destruction of life and property. The second order of trauma comes more abstractly from a pathological inability to comprehend what the first trauma really means. The nature of this inability – with its overlapping component parts of the politically unsayable and the
philosophically unspeakable - is of interest in this paper.
In accordance with Derrida’s first order of trauma, such acts of horrific physical destruction destroy a complacent present, which Chomskyites and others would seek to reconstitute in greater critical understanding of contemporary political affairs - thus political unsayableness would be superseded by discursive transparency.
But perhaps there is a more serious blockage in respect of the second order of trauma. Despite the fact that this year saw the realisation of George W’s goal of the death of Bin Laden, what might be done to address the unspeakable lingering trauma of acts of terror such as 9/11 and of the unseen acts which follow, and, alongside improved political nous, what shifts might we need to effect in our philosophical purview to contend with a precarious world not governed by a filmic logic of finality?