9/11: The Culture of Commemoration

In this meditation on September 11, 2001, and beyond, David Simpson argues that commemorative sites are topoi at which the contradictions of the age are performed. He further claims that a wave of emotion, carefully orchestrated, blotted out reason after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and it is the purpose of critical theory to reverse that trend. Here, “theory” means the literary and philosophical corpus of writing emerging primarily from Germany (through Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno) and France (through Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard), as well as from Giorgio Agamben in Italy and Slavoj Zizek in Slovenia, all of whom critique the self-deceptions of European and American political culture since the 1930s. The attempt to commemorate the victims of 9/11 is a case in point. Simpson denaturalizes the claims to universality in the portraits of grief offered by the New York Times and holds that these widely circulated photographs were drenched with an ideology consistent with that newspaper's collusion in disseminating the lies that the George W. Bush administration invented about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. He finds similar traces of triumphalism in the architectural competitions surrounding the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and in the denial of a common humanity between Americans and Iraqis, etched into the notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib prisoners. Addressing Adorno's claim that we cannot be at home after Auschwitz, he explores notions of binary identities, which project elements of demonization onto an essential other and tell us who we are by telling us who we are not. I am less persuaded by his discussion of the limit case of alterity in Auschwitz. Citing Primo Levi's account of “Musselmänner,” or the walking dead, Simpson wonders why the prisoners, mostly Jews, found in Islam the image of utter abjection. He rejects the notion that those men were beyond the pale, hoping that someone, somewhere touched them or gave them a crust. I doubt it. More convincingly, he raises Agamben's affirmation of our commonality in the need to acknowledge human frailty, which Simpson affirms as diametrically opposed to the crass “humanism” of the West after 9/11.