‘Putting Grief into Boxes’: Trauma and the Crisis of Democracy in Art Spiegelman's<i>In the Shadow of No Towers</i>¹

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Many thanks to Henry A. Giroux and David L. Clark for reading earlier versions of this paper. While the critical input they provided was invaluable to the evolution of this paper, I am solely responsible for the final product (and any mistakes or inaccuracies therein). Notes An earlier, condensed version of this paper was presented at the “Communities in Crisis: Isolation, Desecration, Transformation in the 20th Century” conference held at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, 2–3 April 2005. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), Plate 10. Ibid., Plate 9. See Peter Skinner, World Trade Center: The Giants That Defied the Sky (Vercelli, Italy: White Star, S. R. I., 2002). In referring to 9/11 memorabilia as kitsch, I employ Jean Baudrillard's understanding of the term “kitsch” as “that gallery of cheap junk … which proliferate[s] everywhere,” and which “everywhere reproduces objects smaller or larger than life; it imitates materials (in plaster, plastic, etc.); it apes forms or combines them discordantly.” See Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998), 109–111. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 1. Ibid., 1. Ibid., Plate 10. Joseph McElroy, “Fading Footprints,” Village Voice, 7 September 2004, available at < http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0436/mcelroy.php >, par. 3. Todd Leopold, “Sketches of the Apocalypse,” CNN.com, 9 September 2004, available at < http://edition.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/books/09/09/art.spiegelman >, par. 18. Matt Fraction, “Commentary: In the Shadow of No Towers,” Artbomb.net, 4 November 2004, available at < http://www.artbomb.net/detail.jsp?tid=501&new=1 >, par. 3. Ibid., 2. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 1. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2. Art Spiegelman, quoted in James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art & Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 18. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 5 (my emphasis). Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, (my emphasis). Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides (A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida),” interview by Giovanna Borradori. See Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 100. Carlo Wolff, “In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman,” Post-Gazette.com, 19 September 2004, available at < http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04263/380995.stm >, par. 2–5. Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” New York Times Magazine, 11 July 2004, 30. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 1. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5. Ibid., 37 (her emphasis). Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 2. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2. In 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn challenge Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani's bombastic claims regarding the “bravery or sacrifices of the firefighters” in the World Trade Center on 9/11. See Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 252. Dwyer and Flynn's book does not gainsay the New York fire department's dedication to saving civilians from the fires in the World Trade Center; however, the authors do challenge the mayors' claims that all the firefighters who entered the towers to rescue trapped civilians knowingly (and heroically) went to their own deaths. By including information gleaned from interviews with firefighters and city officials after the attacks, Dwyer and Flynn demonstrate that the high casualty among firefighters on 9/11 was not so much a result of conscious acts of heroism, but rather a result of poor communication with supervisors and the police department—all of which contributed to delaying the evacuation of firefighters at the time of the towers' imminent collapse. This account of what took place at the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 also challenges Peter Skinner's celebration of the towers as architectural wonders. Dwyer and Flynn also adamantly emphasize the Towers' safety flaws (a lack of a fire tower, poor fireproofing, few stairways that are dispersed in various areas of each floor and lead directly from the top to the bottom floor)—flaws which were instrumental in trapping those individuals above and a few stories below the hijacked airplanes' points of impact. In effect, Dwyer and Flynn's account convey the ways in which the Towers themselves contributed in the mass killing of its stranded occupants—a narrative that is certainly silenced in Skinner's World Trade Center: The Giants that Defied the Sky. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 29. Ibid., 29–30. See Ibid., 22. Art Spiegelman. “A Comic Book Response to 9/11 and Its Aftermath (Interview with Claudia Dreifus),” The New York Times, 7 August 2004, available at < http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/07/arts/design/07SPIE.html >, par. 8. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 2. Ibid., Plate 10. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See interview with Jacques Derrida in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy In A Time of Terror, 109. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, Plate 1. Ibid., Plate 8. Ibid., Plate 9. Ibid. Ibid. Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Aurora, Ontario: Garamond Press, 2004), 150. See interview with Jacques Derrida in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy In A Time of Terror, 100. Of course, Derrida, Said, and Giroux do not call for critical citizenship in identical ways. Although the scope of this paper cannot thoroughly address the different ways in which these thinkers seek to mobilize critical citizenship, at the risk of coarsening their arguments and concerns, I will very quickly point to the more salient points of their work here, for the sake of clarity. For Derrida, the concept of deconstruction is always already bound up with the responsibilities of critical citizenship, because the “infinite task of deconstruction” is “to draw on [one's] heritage and its memory for the conceptual tools that allow one to challenge the limits that this heritage has imposed up to now.” See Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 19. Said, on the other hand, addresses the importance of humanism to democratic criticism. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, he argues that “[h]umanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories … humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what ‘we’ have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties.” See Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 28. Giroux's focus on the important role public educators play in the development of critical citizenship demonstrates not only the need for a politics of hope, but also for a kind of politics that dedicates itself to the ongoing project that is critical citizenship: “As committed educators, we cannot eliminate politics, but we can work against a politics of certainty, a pedagogy of censorship, and an institutional formation that closes down rather than opens up democratic relations. This requires that we work diligently to construct a politics without guarantees, one that perpetually questions itself as well as all those form of knowledge, values, and practices that appear beyond the process of interrogation, debate, and deliberation.” See Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Aurora, Ontario: Garamond Press, 2004), 140–141. Tim Grierson, “Believe the Hype? In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman,” Blacktable.com, 20 September 2004, available at < http://www.blacktable.com/grierson040920.htm >, par. 4. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (New York: Verso, 2003), 13. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 2.

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