Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

...witness the surprise of the average American: 'How is it possible that these people display and practise such a disregard for their own lives?' Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact that we, in First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which we would be ready to sacrifice our life?

This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?

En el mercado actual, encontramos toda una serie de productos libres de sus propiedades perjudiciales: café sin cafeína, nata sin grasa, cerveza sin alcohol... Y la lista es larga: ¿no podríamos considerar el sexo virtual como sexo sin sexo, la teoría de Colin Powell de la guerra sin bajas (en nuestro bando, por supuesto) como guerra sin guerra, la redefinición contemporánea de la política como el arte de la administración experta como política sin política, hasta llegar al multiculturalismo liberal y tolerante de hoy en día como experiencia del Otro sin su Otredad (el otro idealizado que baila bailes fascinantes y tiene una visión ecológica y holística de la realidad, mientras que costumbres como la de pegar a las mujeres las dejamos a un lado...)

Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative – the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride – is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the USA got what it deserved, what it had been doing to others for decades) really any better? The predominant reaction of European – but also American – Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the ‘feminist’ point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed (‘castrated’). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding us of Holocaust revisionism (what are the 3,000 dead against millions in Rwanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that the CIA (co-)created the Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument against attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely America’s duty to rid us of the monster it created? The moment we think in the terms of ‘Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism’, the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims. The ethical stance proper is replaced here by the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror, which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable.