September 11, 2006

Zizek on 9/11 five years after

Slavoj Zizek has penned an OpEd for the Guardian in which he argues that "Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise." In the article, titled "On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men," Zizek writes:
The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.

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