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ESSAYS II

Reversed Rapture:
On Salvation, Suicide, and
the Spirit of Terrorism

Diego Cagüeñas

Because no one can jump into the arms of God.


Oh, no. You have to fall.
—Tom Junod, The Falling Man

Outside (In the Clutches of Pure Physics)

Between 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m. on September 11, 2001,


at least two hundred people jumped to their deaths from the top stories of New
York City’s World Trade Center. Against a limpid blue sky, their falling bodies
were in “the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per
second squared” (Junod 2003). The very instant they lost touch with the buildings
they were outside the world of human will and hope, and they became part of the
self-organizing material processes that form and transform the physical universe
(McLean 2009: 226). Their bodies seized in the grasp of brute force were reduced
to matter obeying the rules of physics. The pull of gravity rid them of the faint-
This article would not have been possible without my participation in the Institute for Critical
Social Inquiry (ICSI) at The New School in the summer of 2015. Professor Talal Asad’s spirited
seminar on secularism helped me better understand the moral ambiguity at the heart of liberal poli-
tics. The ideas here expressed are my sole responsibility. I thank Professor Ann Stoler for her invita-
tion to apply to the ICSI and the School of Law and Social Sciences at Universidad Icesi for funding
my stay in New York. I also thank Ana Garay for her help in procuring Paul Chan’s book and Raquel
Díaz for walking with me to the National September 11 Memorial under the cold January drizzle
four years ago.

Public Culture 30:3 DOI 10.1215/08992363-6912139


Copyright 2018 by Duke University Press 465

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Public Culture est trace of agency. They fell and fell — irreversibly. And this happened right in
front of the televising eyes of the whole world, in real time. The crisp light of that
September morning turned their falling into a dramatic befalling; it turned them
into unsuspecting players of an unintended spectacle.
A year after the attacks, USA Today published a brief piece on the 9/11 jump-
ers titled “Desperation Forced a Horrific Decision.” This paragraph stands out
because of its matter-of-fact tone: “For those who jumped, the fall lasted ten sec-
onds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour — not fast enough
to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death
on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped
alone, in pairs and in groups” (Cauchon and Moore 2002). Only ten seconds, ten
unfathomable seconds separate an inconceivable decision from an equally incon-
ceivable death. There is no way to write that horror. It cannot be photographed
either. But written and photographed it was, as if those words and images were
heeding a certain necessity of witness that cannot but be attended. Outside the
symbolic order of law, politics and morals, in the clutch of pure physics, while still
conscious, those falling bodies have become the most troubling images that haunt
the memory of that terrible day.
Why is that? Why do those pictures, unlike any other picture, inspire a hor-
ror unlike any other horror? According to Greg Siegel, images of falling are at
the heart of a whole cosmology whose “potent and enduring moral vocabulary
and metaphysical iconography” is ridden with “figurations of accidents” (2014).
Such cosmology, of course, is largely Judeo-Christian in origin, and it unceas-
ingly haunts the liberal, supposedly secular Western world. I will return to this,
but first let’s pay attention to the etymological and moral nexus of the images of
falling addressed in this article. The Siegel essay is enlightening in this regard.
He reminds us that accident comes from the Latin accidēns, from accidere, from
cadĕre, meaning “to fall.” Disquietingly, cadaver shares a similar etymology:
from the Latin cadāver, from cadĕre, meaning “to fall.” To die is to fall into
a cadaverous state, a cadaver is a body fallen into death, to fall is to become
mortal. Death is the ultimate accident. Much like a disaster. For this word, too,
has a unique astrological ancestry: “Through a Middle French transformation of
the Italian term disastro, which means ‘ill-starred’ or ‘bad-planet,’ it in turn has
origins in Latin (astrum) and still earlier in Greek (astron)” (Gordon and Gordon
2009: 7). A fallen star, an ill-fated planet, a cosmic body gone astray — the disas-
trous fall of an otherwise ordered cosmos.
Thus falling is at the beginning and at the end of all things. It is a primordial
fall, Adam and Eve’s fall, that makes us mortals, that is, fallen beings that survive

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until it is no longer possible to postpone life’s final fall into death. A primordial Reversed Rapture
fall that is tantamount to the inception of evil in the world. Of course, there is a
myriad of ways to fall into death, but it just so happens that on September 11, 2001,
over two hundred people fell to their deaths for over ten seconds while the world
witnessed their departure from (human) life and their entrance into the realm of
physics. I believe that is why so many averted their gazes from those images at
first and why those very same images have become so ingrained in our contem-
porary metaphysical iconography: as they fall, those bodies are entirely subjected
to the “sovereignty of the accidental” (Blanchot 1995: 3), to the sovereignty of
gravity’s divine pull that knows nothing of human travails or aspirations. At least
for thirteen hundred feet. Once they disintegrated on impact, they should have
returned to us so that the labor of mourning could begin. But it was not meant to
be; those bodies are lost forever. So we ask, in the absence of a body, is it possible
to mourn? Is it conceivable to mourn over the images of those bodies that, ulti-
mately, could not be retrieved from the debris of the collapsed towers?
Sometimes, to fall one has to jump. Here is where we meet history. For no two
falls are ever the same. The troubling nature of the images of bodies falling from
the World Trade Center is not something they share with every other image of
falling. While I do believe there is a powerful etymological archive at play in how
those images are metabolized by the social body, etymology can take us only so
far. The particular horror of these images springs from the contingency, the his-
torical specificity that surrounds and makes possible those disastrous falls. This
specificity is best expressed in the controversy around the term jumpers. Indeed,
as reported in the same USA Today piece quoted above, the New York Medical
Examiner’s Office does not classify the people who fell to their deaths on Septem-
ber 11 as “jumpers.” Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s
office, offers this rationale: “A ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the
morning knowing that they will commit suicide.” This is clearly not the case of
9/11 victims, as these people “were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown
out” (Cauchon and Moore 2002). Further, Borakove explains that they could not
determine who jumped because the injuries were similar to those suffered by the
people killed in the collapse of the towers. “The manner of death for all those who
died was listed as homicide on death certificates,” she concludes. So it turns out
that the “horrific decision” announced by the newspaper was no decision at all.
Except for the hijackers, no one chose to die on that day. There was no jumping,
there was no suicide — only murder. Not falling persons (that belong to human
society) but fallen bodies (that belong to pure physics). Or so the story goes.
But is it really that straightforward? Can we be so sure there was no decision

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Public Culture to jump? Is that decision even possible or thinkable or imaginable? Is suicide
madness? Is it an impossible decision? Is it true that, as Tom Junod (2003) claims,
“no one can jump into the arms of God”? Is it true that, on the contrary, one has
to fall into his arms? I think this deserves further consideration because what is
at stake in this particular denial of suicide is the liberal state’s politics of life and
death. That suicide has been taboo in Western societies from their very inception
is no secret. However, there is something about this particular denial of suicide
that brings together the worries and blind spots of contemporary politics. More
exactly, there is something about certain efforts to try and save, to try and redeem
these deaths that is peculiar to our present time, because what they betray is that
there is no longer any widely shared religious or sacred cosmos to which liberal
societies can resort, as “belief in God is no longer axiomatic” (Taylor 2007: 3).
There is no telling where these souls dwell, for there is no telling whether they
are redeemable or hopelessly condemned. It is as if only the hijackers could have
chosen death on 9/11, as if that decision, however mad, however unimaginable,
could only have taken place in the perpetrators’ minds.
This, then, leaves us in deep uncertainty about the morality of those who
fell — and of those who watched, photographed, televised, and broadcasted them
falling. If we accept (as I think we should) that “the idea of suicide as an act of
supreme unreason is very strong in secular law and morality” (Asad 2007: 113),
then we have to ask how is it possible to state, within the frame of the same law
and morality, that “a ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning
knowing that they will commit suicide.” Rather than a confused mind, a jumper
seems to be someone with a strong resolution and a clear goal. He or she has cho-
sen to die. There is nothing hasty in his or her actions. That seems clear enough.
But things can get quite disturbing once one realizes there is also nothing hasty
in the meticulous planning and operation of the nineteen al-Qaeda militants who
hijacked and crashed four airplanes on 9/11. Indeed, studies of suicide missions
and suicide bombings demonstrate the extent to which these acts of terror are
interested not only in physical destruction but also in communicating a message
(Gambetta 2005), or that suicide bombers “are not significantly different from
other rebels or soldiers around the world who are willing to engage in high-risk
activism out of a sense of duty” (Hafez 2006: 6). How to account then for these
“terrorist” actions and decisions, for these murderous suicides so painstakingly
planned out and so prosaic in their rationale? Are they supreme unreason incar-
nated or are they rather the result of a murderous use of reason?

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Jumping (Terrible Freedom) Reversed Rapture

The Falling Man is a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard


Drew of a man falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41 a.m.
It is the best-known photograph of a 9/11 jumper. Time Magazine included it in
its series of the one hundred most influential images of all time. The Falling Man
is also the title of a luminous essay written by Tom Junod for Esquire apropos of
Drew’s photograph. It was originally published two years after the attacks and
still is a must-read for anyone looking to come to terms with the fact that on that
day so many people saw no other way out than jumping to their certain deaths.
Addressing the different reactions Drew’s picture elicited in the American pub-
lic, Junod writes, “Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower,
a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and
therefore terrible: freedom” (2003), which is quite telling if one considers that,
as Talal Asad argues, in the Abrahamic religions “suicide is a sin because it is a
unique act of freedom” (2007: 67). Junod then goes on to write about the “extrem-
ity of choice faced by the people who jumped.” This is because most of the people
who fell from the north tower jumped. That may not make “jumpers” of them, as
the New York Medical Examiner’s Office claims, but the fact remains that most
of them did not slip or trip out of the burning structure. They were not just “forced
out” or “blown out.” No, they jumped. Herein lies the terrible freedom of giving
death to oneself.
If those images of freedom are discordant, terrible, it is because they are not
enactments of unreason. To the contrary, they are the most extreme demonstra-
tion of what taking one’s life in one’s hands truly means. What we see in Drew’s
photograph, and in the many more images of falling bodies on 9/11, is people
giving themselves the gift of death — the gravest of decisions. Whereas it is likely
that some jumped hoping to survive the impact, given the height of the fall I think
the real choice they had was between the sudden death of falling and the grim
prospect of dying inside a burning building. Be that as it may, this terrifying cal-
culus between manners of death ultimately gives way to a more radical, perhaps
impossible choice: to take on the responsibility of one’s own death, to choose
death on one’s own terms. In this regard, Jacques Derrida may shed some light on
these terrible decisions when he posits, “For a decision to be just and responsible,
it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be both regulated and without regula-
tion” (1990: 961). Otherwise we would be simply going through the motions of
conventional wisdom and accepted morality, or engaging in reckless, irresponsible
conduct. A just decision takes heed of the contingent context in which it takes

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Public Culture place and at the same time breaks free from said context. It is both responsible
and irresponsible.
This might explain why Junod could write that it is precisely in the extremity
of choice where the people who jumped found freedom. Can we surmise they
struggled with the conventional wisdom concerning self-inflicted death as sinful
and shameful and cowardly? Had they worried over suicide’s disrepute in a liberal
world that supposedly considers human life to be sacred? Did they agonize over
their troublesome place in their beloveds’ memories? Were all of liberal society’s
regulations that state that human life is to be preserved and not to be taken at
will acutely present in their minds? Whether or not they contemplated such res-
ervations we can never truly know. But, what is certain, in a terrible, frightening
instant, in which reason and unreason are no longer meaningful concepts, they
decided to jump, suspending all regulation. They put themselves outside society
for ten seconds and fifteen hundred feet — and for ten seconds and fifteen hundred
feet they were free.
That freedom cannot be shared. It can only be witnessed. The bright light
of September 11 served well this act of witnessing. Those stark human forms
tumbling through the air could be distinctly seen from afar. Although distance
and the enormity of the buildings obscured their faces, their human form was
unmistakable. It happened in plain view. The most intimate moment of their lives
was there for the world to see. And yet, because their individual identities cannot
be determined and thus they remain largely anonymous, what happened in the
extremity of choice they experienced lingers behind the shroud of secrecy. That
is what Roland Barthes would have called the punctum of Drew’s Falling Man. It
is the secret that this image simultaneously illuminates and conceals what rises
from it and pierces the viewer like an arrow (Barthes 1982: 26). What wounds and
pricks the eye is freedom’s mysterium tremendum. To give oneself the gift of death
might be the utmost responsible decision.
That it is not possible to ascribe their decision to jump to mere unreason is what
I feel most people find troubling in that image. The Falling Man brings together,
if only fleetingly, the demands of reason and responsibility when life cannot be
saved, and the radical intimacy of a decision that no one person can make for
another. To see the ultimate life-or-death decision made in complete solitude
right in front of the world’s disbelieving eyes is not something easy to witness. I
think Derrida’s musings on death are of service at this point of the argument. He
writes, “The secret of responsibility would consist of keeping secret, or ‘incor-
porated,’ the secret of the demonic and thus of preserving within itself a nucleus
of irresponsibility or of absolute unconsciousness” (1995: 20). The irony is that

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liberal law and morality can make sense of suicide only in terms of unreason, and Reversed Rapture
therefore the free, responsible decision of the 9/11 jumpers is erased when their
deaths are listed as homicides. After all, “terrorism” can only murder Westerners;
it cannot lead them to commit suicide, right? Because in the Western, civilized
world life is sacred, and no civilized citizen of the secular world would dare take
a fellow citizen’s life, much less his or her own. Or so it goes. (And as for the lives
of those who do not belong to such a world, well, that is another matter altogether.)
“We don’t like to say they jumped,” asserts the New York Medical Examiner’s
Office (Cauchon and Moore 2002). Of course they do not like to say that. Such a
statement would not be in deference to the heroic narratives foregrounded in the
subsequent so-called war on terror, which is partly why newspapers editors who
decided to publish jumpers’ photographs faced outraged charges of exploitation
and spectacle from the public. The images were effectively censored and quickly
disappeared from the enormous image archive of the most photographed and
videotaped day in the history of the planet — as if such acts of terrible freedom
should not be witnessed. And thus a chance was missed to actually learn some-
thing from the devastation. The punctum in Richard Drew’s Falling Man should
have made us look more attentively instead of turning our gaze away. This is
because “photographs that prick our awareness of atrocity and enlarge our sense
of injustice” might arouse in us a sense of reality and thus better equip us “to take
steps toward halting violence now and in the future” (Kirouac-Fram 2011: 136).
This is what the responsibility of witnessing is about. Respect for and acknowledg-
ment of those who jumped is but the first step toward a more sympathetic gaze,
one that might find in those images of falling bodies not only suicide victims or
terrorism casualties but mortal brethren. Such a gaze might find what is redeem-
ing in the gift of death they gave to themselves and, maybe, to us as well.

Falling (Endless Repetition)

Light is the protagonist in Drew’s Falling Man, just as much as it is in Paul Chan’s
The 7 Lights.1 However, as the name of the series indicates, Chan is concerned
with light that has been “struck out,” a kind of light that illuminates and obscures,
that has as much to do with sharp contours as with vanishing shadows. Six years
after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a different kind of light illuminated a world
deeply entrenched in a spurious “war on terror” and the fear against a phantasmal,

1. From May 15 to July 1, 2007, the Serpentine Gallery presented Paul Chan’s first solo exhibi-
tion in the United Kingdom and the world premiere of the complete series The 7 Lights (2005 – 7).
It can be seen on their website: www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/paul-chan-7 – lights.

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Public Culture ubiquitous enemy. An apocalyptic tone had taken over Western-Christian cosmol-
ogy’s moral vocabulary and metaphysical iconography, mainly in US politics, as
George W. Bush’s speeches after the attacks depicted America as defender of all
that is good and just (“the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity,” in fact),
thereby implying a struggle between light and darkness (Lincoln 2006: 273). Plus,
the not-so-tacit censorship that kept jumpers’ images out of the public debate was
losing its hold. Slowly but surely, those figurations of accidents were finding their
place in 9/11 iconography and in the public space (for example in Don DeLillo’s
novel The Falling Man and Eric Fischl’s infamous sculpture Tumbling Woman).
So it is only fitting that Chan describes the series as “hallucinating the seven days
of creation from dawn to dusk.” But make no mistake: Chan’s work is far from
“religious art.” His intention behind The 7 Lights is neither to create thematic
pieces for religious education nor to re-create Biblical lore for the twenty-first-
century art consumer. Quite the opposite: there is a sort of secularist anxiety that
traverses the series, which seems to spring from the troubling realization that it
is no longer possible (provided it ever was) to talk about the contemporary world
without resorting to a language that resembles, if not downright imitates, that of
the Abrahamic tradition. In a 2009 interview Chan makes it crystal clear: “In
the 21st Century I didn’t think I’d have to think about God ever again.” Thus the
power of The 7 Lights is born out of the fertile yet vexing tension between God’s
intromission into Chan’s life and Chan’s assertion that 9/11 was a “secular catas-
trophe” (McKee 2009: 3).
When I saw 1st Light in the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2015,
I was struck. The black silhouettes crossing the rectangle of white light projected
on the floor told me the story I am trying to articulate in this article. They seemed
to bring together so many disparate forces and ideas in such an elegant, subdued
way. Even though there is great violence in what happens to the silhouettes as they
move across the white space, the tone is far from facile propaganda or prosely-
tism. Chan does not indulge in the cheap thrill of war miseries or the spectacle
of destruction. Yates McKee wrote an insightful essay on Chan’s oeuvre, and
I believe he gets it right when he claims that Chan frequently marks “singular
bodies and faces, sounds and gestures, object and spaces as enigmatic ciphers of
world-historical catastrophe and redemption” (2009: 6). In other words, in some
of his pieces and most certainly in The 7 Lights, Chan has given us his own figu-
rations of accidents that belong to a metaphysical iconography of disaster and
violence that uncannily resembles the world born out of the ashes of 9/11. For in
The 7 Lights there is falling too.

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But what exactly happens in 1st Light? It is almost too simple. An oblique rect- Reversed Rapture
angle of white light is projected on the floor. Viewers can walk around it as they
please. The stark black silhouettes of an electrical utility pole and two streetlights
frame the scene. The electric wires flutter slightly. Is it wind, an earthquake, or
some other force? There is no way to find out. For a while nothing else hap-
pens. Suddenly a train’s silhouette appears and slowly begins to move upward,
as if pulled by an inscrutable force. Soon other commodities of modern life join
the train in its painstaking upward movement: a motorcycle, a bicycle, a station
wagon. It looks like the foreboding work of a metaphysical force that destroys as it
elevates. It is impossible not to be reminded of the iconography of the Final Judg-
ment and the divine separation of the saved from the damned. And then the bodies
appear. They move much faster than the other objects in the scene, and they move
in the opposite direction. They are falling. Some fall alone, others fall in twos
or threes, sometimes holding hands, sometimes straight like arrows, sometimes
tumbling without grace. The relation to the rapture is disrupted; the human figures
are moving downward, contrary to salvation’s redeeming pull — gravity trumps
metaphysical force.2 What to make of this? Are those falling bodies condemned
or might it be that the rapture has been reversed? Are they saved precisely because
they fall? Again, there is no way to find out. Then the scene becomes increasingly
cluttered as the debris being lifted by invisible forces obscures the white rect-
angle until it is no longer possible to tell apart any recognizable shape. Before the
rectangle turns completely black, the projection goes into a loop and starts anew.
There is no resolution, only repetition. Endless repetition.3
So what kind of light has been “struck out”? This is Chan’s reply: “This
light does not illuminate things to see per se. It is instead a kind of light that
transmits — in its lack — the very shape of things. A light that shows by not shin-
ing” (2007: 120). The translucent, blue light that illuminates the images of the 9/11
jumpers has been replaced, in Chan’s worldview, by a light that can only extract
shapes from the shadows. Such a light produces abstract figurations of accidents

2. Briefly, in Christian eschatology the rapture refers to the belief that either before, or simulta-
neously with, the second coming of Jesus Christ to Earth, believers who have died will be raised or
believers who are still alive and remain shall be caught up together with the resurrected dead believ-
ers in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (McKim 2014: 262).
3. The following five Lights follow pretty much the same script: we see endless repetitions of
floating objects, animals — mostly birds — and people as they enter, traverse, and exit the lighted
space. Seventh Light operates differently; it is not a digital projection. As the exhibition website
explains, it recasts the entire series of projections as a musical composition, imagining the tension
between lightness and darkness as silence and sound. My analysis does not consider this last Light.

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Public Culture that intensify the relative anonymity of those who fell from the World Trade Cen-
ter. Those falling silhouettes have no claim to identity or individuality; they are
eminently interchangeable, which is why they can turn into enigmatic ciphers of
world-historical catastrophe. In the scenery of such a catastrophe, Chan’s light
casts a shadow of moral ambiguity on those falling human shapes. Why do they go
in the opposite direction than the one followed by commodities and animal forms?
It looks as if they were effectively condemned, that is, until repetition begins. The
7 Lights are perpetual loops with no end in sight. Thus there is neither salvation
nor condemnation, neither redemption nor damnation. Perhaps there is nothing
better the supposedly secular, liberal world has to offer. Unable to posit a transcen-
dent horizon of meaning or a historical, even eschatological, teleology, it turns to
the feeble illusion of order and meaning that repetition can grant. “Informed by
the simplicity and the compulsive, maniacal repetitiousness of a litany, [Chan’s
projections] turn a world of pure disorder into a rhythmic structure, a reassuring
mantra” (Gioni 2007: 75). It is all but an illusion, and Chan knows it well.
A secular catastrophe cannot yield salvation or damnation because there is
no eschatological order to which the world might belong. A radically immanent,
secular world, a world that “has its outside on the inside” (Nancy 1997: 58), can
only promise that the end, the final end, will never arrive — there will be no end to
repetition. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze states, “In every respect,
repetition is a transgression” (2001: 1). What this means is that repetition trans-
gresses our expectations of completeness that imply a clear beginning and a dis-
tinct end. A story. But Chan does not provide us one, just as the secular world
cannot provide us one — but many. Secularity is the explosion and proliferation of
narratives that cannot aspire or pretend to provide us with an ultimate meaning or
a unique morality on which to ground an ultimate sense of community. Everything
becomes human, all too human. In a world that has its outside on the inside, in a
world no longer in need of salvation, every fall is as meaningful or as meaningless
as the next. And thus we keep on falling — endlessly, without salvation in sight.

Salvation (The Inaccessible)

The profound impression that Chan’s 1st Light left me with compelled me to the
National September 11 Memorial the day after my visit to the Whitney Museum.
I had been there before, but I felt I needed to see it with new eyes. It was the
middle of the summer, and the sky was as bright and blue as on that unforgettable
date. It was a gorgeous day. The strict security checkpoints of a year earlier had
been lifted, and people were free to move about. Under the burning sun, visitors

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took pictures and ate ice cream. The twin reflecting pools looked magnificent, Reversed Rapture
and the roar of the cascading water was actually soothing. Because they are set
within the footprints of the Twin Towers, the enormity of the pools underscores
the vast scope of the destruction. The feeling of loss was almost tangible. But,
standing before those two black voids, I could not help but think of those who
jumped to their deaths on that very same spot. It looked to me that, unintendedly,
the memorial made their fall longer, if not endless. Indeed, no matter where one
stands, it is not possible to see the bottom of the pools, as if signifying that once
in the grip of their gravitational pull a body will fall forever without ever hitting
ground. They are abysmal, unending cascades. The whole site had a descending
tropism I had not noticed in my previous visits. It all pointed downward, as if the
ultimate meaning of what befell on that day was to be found in the unreachable
pools’ nadir.
Architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design statement for the 9/11
Memorial is intriguing.4 They depict the twin pools, which are surrounded by
bronze parapets where the names of nearly three thousand men, women, and chil-
dren killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and February 26, 1993, are
inscribed, as “large voids” that function as “open and visible reminders of the
absence.” As for the experience of standing by the water’s edge, this is how they
envision it: “Looking at a pool of water that is flowing away into an abyss, a visi-
tor to the site can sense that what is beyond this parapet edge is inaccessible.” I
would add that it is not only inaccessible, it is unnamable too. Out of the body’s as
well as the mind’s reach. What exactly is beyond the parapet edge? What lies at
the bottom of the falling waters? As with Chan’s looping projections of impend-
ing doom, we are left without definitive answers. Arad and Walker named their
project Reflecting Absence. Their intention was “to let absence speak for itself,”
“to make the abysses into the primary symbols of the incalculable loss of life”
that befell on the American people on that fateful day. But amidst this imperious,
salient absence, there is no appearance of the jumpers whatsoever. Their terrible
decision is not acknowledged anywhere in the memorial. Not only this. The 9/11
Memorial Museum set up an online time line of the attacks in which there is no
mention of people jumping. It is as if the memorial cannot reflect their particular
absence, as if their unfathomable decision had left them out of the official histori-
cal record and of the accepted survivors’ memory.
Only 293 intact bodies were rescued from the rubble of the World Trade Cen-
ter. Given the scope of the catastrophe, that means that there were effectively no

4. It can be read on the memorial’s website: www.911memorial.org/design-competition.

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Public Culture physical remains to bury and mourn, and as Gillian Rose has taught, “without
proper burial and mourning we cannot rest and we cannot recommence” (Rose
1996: 102). There are several immaterial, virtual traces, however. There are sev-
eral voice recordings of those who died in the towers and in the airplanes, for
instance.5 And of course, there are countless video and photographic records
of that day. In fact, what was left in the wake of that disaster is an apparently
inexhaustible image archive. These are no negligible remains even if they can-
not fully perform the funerary function of mortal remains. Quite the opposite: as
the nation-state cannot achieve complete control over it, this untidy repository of
images constitutes a powerful resource for the work of political imagination and
collective grieving — so much so that these virtual remains might finally redeem
the jumpers’ fate. Such is the potency of these images, of these figurations of
disaster. As Robert Hertz shows in his seminal essay “A Contribution to the Study
of the Collective Representation of Death,” “the brute fact of physical death is
not enough to consummate death in people’s minds: the image of the recently
deceased is still part of the system of things of this world, and looses itself from
them only gradually by a series of internal partings” (2004: 81). This is true. Even
though the jumpers’ images have been denied a place in the official record of the
attacks up until now, they nevertheless remain part of the system of things of this
world. What The Falling Man and The 7 Lights bring to the fore, although through
different representational mechanisms, is that our supposedly secular world is
yet to part with the jumpers. That is, it has yet to find the social mechanisms that
would help it metabolize and make sense of the terrible freedom that lies behind
the secret of the gift of death when it is given to oneself.
In the absence of bodies to bury and to mourn, the National September 11
Memorial is effectively a site of phantom grief as defined by Laura Tanner: a site
for the struggle “to apprehend as lived experience a loss that is and is not virtual”
(2006: 226). The virtual elicits a troubled, dubious work of mourning, for it can-
not fully replace the physical body. And insofar as mourning does not come to an
end, the liberal system of things will still be at a loss about what to do with those
disturbing images, including those of the jumpers — especially those of the jump-
ers. Hence, while the memorial’s aim is to reflect absence, it also serves to remark
how inaccessible salvation continues to be for the liberal imagination, especially
the salvation of suicide victims. Therefore, their fall cannot end. They have to fall

5. For example, 9/11: Phone Calls from the Towers and Voices from Inside the Towers are two
documentaries that provide an inside perspective to what happened on 9/11 through phone calls and
phone messages left by those trapped inside the buildings.

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perpetually, forever about to die, because once they touch ground and disintegrate, Reversed Rapture
their deaths would become irredeemable.
The bottomless pools achieve this remarkably well. Dark, beautiful, and thun-
derous, they open a space where the jumpers can aspire to a salvation of sorts as
long as their fall never ends. Thus, Chan’s endless repetition (that forecloses both
salvation and damnation while intimating that any kind of order is nothing but
man-made and thus illusory and fleeting) has no place in the memorial. Instead
we find the epitome of falling. It is true, as its designers intended, that noth-
ing is as present in the memorial as absence, as the phantasmal presence of the
departed. But absence is not death; absence is not the completion of mourning.
On the contrary, it is the outmost expression of a mourning yet to be satisfied. The
peace that surrounds the reflecting pools belies the traumatic drama of death that
is still being played in that sixteen-acre site: a drama that is and is not virtual.
One of psychoanalysis’s main lessons is that trauma is the experience that one
has gone through but cannot have. As long as their fall meets no end, there will
be no owning of their terrible experience, and the jumpers will keep on waiting
for their deaths to be saved and redeemed into our metaphysical iconography of
disaster and loss.

Conclusion: Prolepsis or the Spirit of “Terrorism”

When United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m., there was no
doubt that history was being made and unmade. That is when it became clear that
the first crash had been no accident. Up until that moment it was evident that we
were witnessing something of local significance, but after the second crash there
was a break in Western history that suddenly and drastically turned upside down
Western accepted cosmology. In this regard allow me to quote at some length
Claude Lefort’s reflections: “It is while the event is still a living memory that there
arises a feeling that a break has occurred, but that it not occurred within time, that
it establishes a relationship between human beings and time itself, that it makes
history a mystery; that it cannot be circumscribed within the field of what are
termed political, social, or economic institutions; that it establishes a relationship
between human beings and the institution itself; that it makes society a mystery”
(2006: 148). A double mystery then: history and society become mysterious for
human beings.
For Lefort, this is the result of the French Revolution’s secularizing thrust.
Something that is experienced as coming from outside time and social institu-
tions severs the ties between human beings and any kind of transcendental hori-

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Public Culture zon of meaning. When time is nothing but passing time, it becomes a mystery;
when society is based on nothing but society itself, it turns mysterious. The world
becomes an empty space in which power is deployed for no other reason than
power’s own sake. As Lefort insists, in a modern democracy the exercise of power
refers neither to “an outside that can be assigned to the gods, the city, or holy
ground” nor to “an inside that can be assigned to the substance of the community”
(ibid.: 160). Secular, modern democracy is a contingent cultural and ideological
formation whose double secret is that it is both godless and groundless. The West’s
dream of a self-sufficient society with no need to legitimate itself in reference to
some kind of divine order or on the basis of some sort of natural ground rests on
this double secret. On 9/11 it suffered a rude awakening.
The disaster was not just historical in the sense that it had historical importance;
it was historical because it changed the West’s sense of history altogether. The
double mystery of secular society became blatantly visible as bodies and buildings
fell to the ground. The befalling of disaster was being written in plain view. Such
an experience might be described with these words: “We constantly need to say
(to think): that was quite something (something quite important) that happened to
me. By which we mean at the same time: that couldn’t possibly belong to the order
of things which come to pass, or which are important, but is rather among the
things which export and deport. Repetition” (Blanchot 1995: 9). “Something quite
important that happened to me.” But is it always clear that something is important
in the very moment it happens? At least that is not always the case with traumatic,
disastrous events. Those are the things that export and deport; things that push us
outside the world as we know it; things that send us to exile and leave us without
the shelter of meaning and order — traumatic things that we go through and yet
cannot own. These things do not belong to our everyday world; they come from
without, disrupting conventional wisdom and accepted morality. They disrupt and
tear asunder. They make us fall. And maybe even jump.
This is why the West sees in “terrorism” an expression of pure unreason, just
like suicide. Even though there are studies that show that some suicide attacks
might be explained as the result of local struggles between families amidst certain
social networks (Pedahzur and Perliger 2006), for example, “terrorism” is mostly
regarded as pure, mad violence that comes from without. However, after 9/11 that
external force moved into the very heart of Western politics, if only in a phantas-
mic, spectral fashion. The fall of the Tower of Babel brought speech confusion
and broke humanity into herds and tribes. In an uncanny repetition of disaster, the
fall of the Twin Towers brought moral confusion and broke humanity (yet again)
into the civilized citizens of the liberal state on the one side, and the barbarian

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terrorists on the other. In this cosmic moral partition suicide falls squarely on the Reversed Rapture
barbarian side of things. Thus it is no surprise that suicide bombing has become
the foremost deadly weapon of “terrorist” attacks whose main target and goal are
defenseless and vulnerable victims, and the horror that lingers after the destruc-
tion of the human body (Cavarero 2011). Only the barbarians kill themselves, only
the unreasonable kill others by killing themselves; which is why no American
citizen could have jumped on 9/11.
It is not just a matter of cowardice vis-à-vis the heroic narrative that rose from
the towers’ debris. Rather, the denial of suicide has to do with the absence of ritu-
als in the liberal world for dealing with the kind of transgression that suicide’s
unique freedom entails. As suicide victims are frequently cast under a dubious
moral light, the images of their fall threaten the identity of the living to whom
they were bound. And if one takes into account that the terrible decision to jump
was made in the aftermath of “terrorist” violence, then suicide becomes even more
questionable; more of a cop-out than a brave decision (Leonard 2011). To repeat:
only barbarians kill themselves. No one jumped. I interpret The Falling Man,
The 7 Lights, and the 9/11 Memorial pools as more or less successful attempts to
interrupt those bodies’ fall long enough as to make them redeemable and their
memory salvable. But what happens in the modern liberal world is that, since “the
fall corresponds to the laws of mechanics, the interruption of this falling down is
not stabilized into an enduring synthesis but proceeds toward a resumption of the
general collapse” (Hamacher 1996: 269). The fall can be halted only for a limited
period of time as it responds to the mechanics of pure physics. For days, years,
even for whole centuries, we can delay the final collapse; in the end everything
succumbs to gravity’s pull and finally hits ground. In the meantime, our collec-
tive work should be to create strong enough syntheses that would allow us to cope
with disaster and help us realize that “the work of mourning is difficult but not
interminable; beginnings may be made in the middle” (Rose 1996: 122).
This is something extremely hard to achieve under the spectral shadow of ter-
rorism. What we have witnessed after the towers fell is not a sobering of the liberal
mind and the recognition of the secrets that lie in the groundlessness of so-called
secular society. On the contrary, the ever-present threat of the next “terrorist”
attack has engendered an intensification of violence and cruelty in the name of
“national security.” After 9/11 it has become increasingly clear that “cruelty is an
indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order,
an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of
others and therefore their deaths less disturbing” (Asad 2007: 94). The fall of
the Twin Towers was the inception of terrorism’s prolepsis, the beginning of the

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Public Culture constant and systematic representation of “terrorist” actions as existing before
they actually do. The preemptive politics of the liberal state reinforces the spec-
tral, ever-threatening spirit of “terrorism.” We live in the repetitive prolepsis of
“terrorism’s” shadowy presence, as in a perpetual loop that constantly reminds
us we might be the next to face the impossible decision to take life into our own
hands. Given that modern liberalism insists on sowing the seeds of catastrophe
as it draws the dividing line between “civilization” and “barbarism” through the
repetitive use of increasingly violent means, thus deepening the already scandal-
ous gap between the haves and the have nots, jumping into salvation might be our
last recourse when facing the extremity of choice. Because no one can fall into the
arms of God. Oh, no. You have to jump.

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Diego Cagüeñas is an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the master’s


program in social and political studies at Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia.

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