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Jennifer Bajorek Terrorism, before it is an act, is a calculation, on the basis of future traces, in anticipation of how traces yet to be made will someday be read. As such, it is more than casually bound up with the complex movements of textuality on both sides--on the side (to use the familiar shorthand) of both the sender and the receiver of the message. Witness the emphasis placed by many professional readers in the days after the events of 11 September 2001, on the fact that they were readable and remarkable as "symbolic acts."1 What the reference to the symbol, however, with all that it necessarily entails of totalization, aestheticization, and extreme cognitive ambition, does not exactly cover over but does not exactly help us to isolate or pinpoint is the historical interruption that every text bears within it and that pushes our experience of the peculiar temporality of the terrorist act ineluctably in the direction of accident.2 This experience is in error (in the sense that it does not correspond to the "truth" or "facts" of the event), and yet it accurately records the extent to which the calculation that preceded the event takes us to the limits of reason, even if it is not strictly speaking in itself irrational. Terror is infected by accident; it spreads toward accident as we try to read or understand it, not because it has to do with accident in any rigorous sense, but because it doesn't, expressing instead the moment when calculation and incalculability collide. This collision, whatever else it may be (more or less spectacular, harmless, or murderous in its effects), is not an accident and never takes place by accident. It is this same movement that, to paraphrase Mallarmé, restrains every action from the moment that it understands itself as something outside, or just plain other than, a text.3 I cite Mallarmé, not because he was a so-called symbolist, but because he focuses our attention on the difference between accident and calculation's failure with admirable precision. In texts like Igitur and Un Coup de dés the poet teaches us that it is never an accident that language refers. It is just that that reference is always incalculable. For those who will by now be wondering whether we have not gone too far afield in citing a poet who died in 1898--and, worse, whose name is caught up with a poetics of blankness, sterility, and inaction--in the context of a reflection on terrorism, let us recall that Jean Paulhan repeatedly dubbed the attempt to cleanse language of incalculability, "Terror."4 The point is not to suggest that the terrorism on our minds today is somehow purely linguistic or that the violent and terrible deaths caused by the terrorist acts of September 11 (and all the other dates, too) have existed only to end up "in a book."5 The point, rather, is simply to remind us that books or, better, texts have some singular lessons to teach about the aberrant experience that we necessarily have every time that we try to calculate with the incalculable--the experience that we ourselves have had, and will doubtless continue to have, in trying to read or understand the traces of the terrorist calculation. Who could disagree that any serious thinking about terrorism must try to keep this experience at its center? All the more so if it wants to think terrorism in terms of its temporal and historical dimensions and to "calculate" an appropriate response, and precisely insofar as this response must break with calculation, as I will argue it must? 1 Gayatri Spivak used this phrase, and very explicitly placed such emphasis, at a teach-in organized by students and faculty of Columbia University held at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City on 20 September 2001. Others who have focused on the symbolic nature of the events in their analyses include Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Symbolic Terror," Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 573-79: "Terror is a feature of the symbolic order" (p. 573); John Frow, "The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies," Symploke 11, nos. 1-2 (2003): 69-76: "The event of 9/11 worked so powerfully because it was an extraordinary--an exemplary--piece of symbolism" (p. 72); and Homi K. Bhabha, "Terror and After...," Parallax 8, no. 1 (2002): 3-4. Although Bhabha does not speak directly of the symbol, he mobilizes the language and logic of the symbol in his analysis of the events' spectacular and even cinematic echoes and effects. Both Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard have made much of the symbolic dimensions of the Twin Towers, although not to the exclusion of theorizing a more general symbolism of terrorist violence. See Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London, 2002), p. 82, and Jean Baudrillard, " The Spirit of Terrorism" and "Requiem for the Twin Towers," trans. Turner (London, 2002). Baudrillard writes: It is probable that the terrorists had not foreseen the collapse of the Twin Towers (any more than had the experts!), a collapse which--much more than the attack on the Pentagon--had the greatest symbolic impact. The symbolic collapse of a whole system came about by an unpredictable complicity, as though the towers, by collapsing on their own, by committing suicide, had joined in to round off the event. In a sense, the entire system, by its internal fragility, lends the initial action a helping hand. [Pp. 7-8] And again: "The terrorist violence here is not, then, a blowback of reality, any more than it is a blowback of history. It is not 'real'. In a sense, it is worse: it is symbolic. Violence in itself may be perfectly banal and offensive. Only symbolic violence is generative of singularity" (pp. 29-30). Finally, see Jacques Derrida's nuanced and suggestive discussion of still other symbolic dimensions in his 22 October 2001 interview with Giovanna Borradori: Right at the level of the head, this double suicide will have touched two places symbolically and operationally essential to the American corpus: the economic place or capital "head" of world capital (the World Trade Center, the very archetype of the genre, for there are now--and under this very name--WTCs in many places of the world, for example, in China) and the strategic, military, and administrative place of the American capital. [Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides," in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Borradori (Chicago, 2003), pp. 95-96] At the risk of stating the obvious, let us recall that to speak of the symbolism of terror and terrorist violence is not in any way to reduce or distract us from either their materiality or their political nature. On the contrary, as Bhabha reminds us: "The decision to implement and administer terror, whether it is done in the name of god or the state, is a political decision " (p. 3), and this decision is irreducible. 2 Derrida's whole discussion of September 11 as a "date" and an "event" (a "major event") is relevant here; see Derrida and Borradori, "Autoimmunity," pp. 85-91. 3See Stéphane Mallarmé, L'Action restreinte, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945), pp. 369-73. 4 Paulhan was, among other things, extremely well versed in Mallarmé's work. For his best known and most sustained treatment of Terror, see Jean Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes; ou, La Terreur dans les lettres (Paris, 1941). An English translation of this volume by Michael Syrotinski is forthcoming. See also Paulhan's early texts on rhetoric, especially Paulhan, "Rhetoric Rises from Its Ashes," trans. Jennifer Bajorek, in A Larger Language: The Theoretical Writings of Jean Paulhan . 5 I am alluding here to Mallarmé's much quoted if little understood statement: "Everything in the world exists to end up in a book." |