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BIMBISAR IROM Alterities in a Time of Terror: Notes on the Subgenre of the American 9/11 Novel inting at the crisis in representation in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Jacques Derrida asserts that what he names “the event” is a dual- featured phenomenon constituted “of the ‘thing’ itself (that which happens or comes) and the impression (itself at once ‘spontaneous’ and ‘controlled’) that is given, left, or made by the so-called ‘thing’” (89). Driving a cleft between the thing and its impression, Derrida says that “the impression is ‘informed,’ in both senses of the word: a predominant system gave it form, and this form then gets run through an organized information machine (language, communication, rhetoric, image, media, and so on).... [which] is from the very outset political, technical, economic” (89). In contrast to the informed impression, the event is incomprehensible: “The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me. . . the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend” (90). The responses to the 9/11 attacks, originating from both the state apparatus and the ethical-aesthetic sphere, belong to the realm of the impression and are thus
Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press
Published: Nov 13, 2012
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