Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Undoubtedly, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 has been an unprecedented visual event. And yet, as was pointed out by an article published in Esquire in 2003, "in the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo." This taboo looks like the other side of what Allen Feldman calls a "temporal therapy": "the audience was being given temporal therapy by witnessing a mechanical sequence of events, over and over, which restored the linearity of time, which had been suspended with the assaults." Still, images like the photograph that is well-known under the title of "Falling Man" could be, thanks to their peculiar temporality, a good antidote against this "temporal therapy," which aims at the formation of a specific "collective memory, and therefore of collective forgetfulness." On top of a study on this kind of pictures, this paper will take into account the late Merleau-Ponty's idea of a mutual precession of reality and images as a useful tool for understanding the peculiar temporality of such pictures.
Keywords
9/11 - jumpers - tragic images - iconoclasm - precession - linearity
The questions that need to be asked of images in our time [...] are not just what they mean and what they do. We must also ask how they live and move, how they evolve and mutate, and what sorts of needs, desires, and demands they embody, generating a field of affect and emotion that animates the structures of feeling that characterize our age.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 2011, xix
1 If it were not for its Images
By now we know this well: 9/11 was the beginning of something. Something whose political and medial components, as well as a third element linked to the psychoanalytic field, are melted in a whole that I would first of all qualify as aesthetic, according to the meaning assumed by this term in a philosophical tradition that does not cease to recall its etymon.
Three months later Jürgen Habermas stated as follows: "Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse-everything that was not Hollywood anymore but, rather,...