(DOWNLOAD) "Phillip E. Wegner. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Book Review)" by Utopian Studies ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Phillip E. Wegner. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Book Review)
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 184 KB
Description
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 279 pp. Paperback, $22.95, ISBN: 978-0-8223-4473-5. The cover art for Phillip Wegner's second monograph shows an aerial photograph of that most eerily present of absences: the space formerly occupied by the two towers that constituted the World Trade Center. The image may serve as a deterrent to some readers: Do we really need another delineation of the cultural significance of that absence and the events (or nonevents, as Weguer will suggest) that caused it to be so? But Wegner's lively and wide-ranging study is less about 9/11 as a moment in itself, or even as a moment that inaugurated a new historical era, than as a moment of closure. Drawing upon Alain Badiou's notion of "the Event"--a phenomenon that, in its break with the status quo, embodies "the very possibility of a radical new beginning" (23)--the author suggests that the terrorist attack on New York and the Pentagon was not, as many commentators have suggested, a hitherto unimaginable, entirely Other rupture in the fabric of history. Rather, the attacks were a "repetition" of a truly incommensurate and radically Other occurrence, a bona fide Event--the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was not until the "second death" that took place on September 11, 2001, that the Event in Berlin almost twelve years earlier was "completed"; it was only this second collapse that allowed the true meaning and significance of the first to be revealed. Thus the "Long Nineties" that intervened between the first and second deaths, the Event and its repetition, were in some sense ahistorical, a temporal parenthesis in which "new kinds of political and cultural experimentation" became possible. Understanding 9/11 in this way allows us to recognize those eleven years and ten months as "a coherent cultural period," and a rather singular one at that. Wegner goes on to argue that the apocalyptic mood pervading many of the cultural texts produced in this period is not merely attributable to fin-de-siecle anxiety but operated in the service of prefiguring the narrative closure that the fall of the Berlin Wall required in order to make sense, a closure that was ultimately to come when those planes made contact with the towers of the World Trade Center. Much of the cultural production of the Long Nineties, then, offered up premonitions, or "figurations," of the second death that was to be the necessary supplement to the first.
 "Phillip E. Wegner. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Book Review)" by Utopian Studies ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}