Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture 1498513131, 9781498513135

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Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture Emmanouil Aretoulakis

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aretoulakis, Emmanouil, author. Forbidden aesthetics, ethical justice, and terror in modern western culture / Emmanouil Aretoulakis. Lanham : Lexington, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. LCCN 2016011662 (print) | LCCN 2016012731 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498513128 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498513135 (Electronic) LCSH: Tragic, The. | Tragedy. | Terrorism. | Aesthetics. | Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. LCC BH301.T7 A74 2015 (print) | LCC BH30`.T7 (ebook) | DDC 111/.85--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011662 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Natasa, of course

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction From the Sublime Anti-Aesthetic to the Retrieval of Beauty The Forbidden Image: Terrorism, Memory, and Disinterested Pleasure Notes 1

2

3

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Does Beauty Think?: The Scope of Aesthetic Reflection and the Scene of Terror 1 Ethics and the Aesthetics of Imagining Politics, Ethics, and the Beautiful The Beautiful, Not the Sublime: Toward an Aesthetics of Freedom Life is Beautiful—After All Notes A Glimpse into the Forbidden: Aesthetic Appreciation, Kant, and 9/11 29 Damien Hirst and the TV Image of 9/11 The Ethics and Politics of Disaster Art Stockhausen’s Romantic Vision: Authenticity and Terrorism Terrorism, Performance, and its Audience Notes The Nuclear Image and the Forbidden Aesthetics of Beauty 63 Los Alamos: Nuclear Scientists as Poets Authentic Art and the Nuclear Blast Nuclear Terrorism in New York? Zeus as A Terrorist Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Planes of Aesthetic Terror(ism) Stunning Image and the Japanese Memory of Horror The Post-Aesthetic and the Artistic in the Nuclear Reality Notes The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Fascination and the Terrorism of Nature 105 Imagination: Witnessing the Ineffable Delight: Representation, Terror and Edmund Burke Art, Fantasy, and Disaster Tourism in Post-Quake Lisbon vii

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Catastrophism: Revisiting the Earthquake as Show Business Notes Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index

145 149 157

Acknowledgments

An earlier and shorter version of chapter 2 was published as “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11,” in the electronic journal Contemporary Aesthetics 6 (2008): sect. 1. I would like to thank the editor for letting me use that material. An early and rather short version of chapter 3 was published as “Acknowledging Fascination with Catastrophe and Terrorism: September 11 and the Nuclear Destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki,” in the electronic journal Sanglap 1, no. 1 (2014). I would like to thank the editors for giving me permission to make use of that material.

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This book is about beauty in a terrorizing world. More specifically, it is about the subjective experience of the beautiful in the face of terror and human tragedy. I am making the proposition that behind the horror, repulsion, and outrage felt by humanity before images of natural or manmade catastrophes/acts of terror(ism) throughout the centuries lurks a kind of inexplicable individual fascination. It is a fascination, arguably a true aesthetic experience of the beautiful, that most of us, eyewitnesses or other, would not be willing to acknowledge due to the immorality of such a concession. That feeling goes unacknowledged because improper is a forbidden feeling and the aesthetics connected with it is a forbidden aesthetics. The forbidden aesthetics that I am proposing is naturally dominant in representations of the terrorist event par excellence of the twenty-first century, namely, September 11, 2001, but shows itself also in other catastrophic landmarks in history, for instance, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombing in 1945, or the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami, both of which could be characterized, radically, as terrorist manifestations too, regardless of whether the former event took place in the context of a generalized war while the latter emerged as a symptom of “physical” terrorism, the terrorism of nature. This book concentrates upon those three watershed events that have left an indelible mark upon the way we construct violence, terrorism, and destruction. Paul Virilio has famously said that terrorist attack, accident, and systems failure are all interchangeable notions or phenomena. The common denominator in all is the element of terror which is the name that we give to performances or events that involve a certain degree of uncertainty or insecurity. 1 Terror which jeopardizes our secure and settled Western life style lies at the core of the three major events under investigation in this project. Indeed, terror is terrorist in its very constitution as something haphazard, hence possibly evil. Let us not forget that even during the Enlightenment the clash between the medievalist view of divine intervention on the one hand, and the progressive attitude concerning the need for a scientific explanation of abnormal natural or unnatural phenomena on the other, rendered the interpretation of such phenomena vulnerable to both, prejudice and rational (but subjective) conjecture as to whether God, nature or something else was responsible for the occurrence of terxi

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rifying events. Consequently, and for lack of a single specific explanation, an abnormal event could simultaneously be a natural phenomenon as well as evil doing, God’s will, as well as an accident. In this light, the aftershock Lisbon tsunami (as well as any other tsunami in history), the Hiroshima Holocaust and the September 11—or “9/11”—terrorist attacks are all instances of terrorism against the human. FROM THE SUBLIME ANTI-AESTHETIC TO THE RETRIEVAL OF BEAUTY It is true that late modern and postmodern thinkers have felt much more comfortable resorting to the category of the sublime in order to account for the uncanny and terrifying nature of a violent event in history. Jacques Derrida, for example, rushed to assign the 9/11 attacks the quality of sublimity. He argued that “the brevity of the appellation [9/11]” constitutes a metonymy that “points out the unqualifiable,” and at the same time, denies “our powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion.” 2 In short, we are being dwarfed by something inconceivable. It has already become a commonplace that twentieth century postmodern aesthetics privileged the quality of the sublime over that of the beautiful. One only has to read Paul de Man or Jean Francois Lyotard to realize that the invocation of the sublime was a call for the deconstruction of aesthetics as a “positive” quality, at the same time that the beautiful stood for an aesthetics that was conventionalized. 3 For Lyotard, it is the failure of speech to represent the major ethical catastrophe with the World Wars during the twentieth century that calls for the advent of the sublime—as the “silent” or formless—which, in turn, will preserve the unpresentable in history and philosophy. Allegedly, calm feeling associated with the beautiful—the tranquil appreciation of artistic and natural harmony, for instance—is no longer capable of communicating the real insofar as such a feeling hinges upon an idealized, transcendental, version of history that has nothing whatsoever to do with the human condition. As has been eloquently put, “the feeling of the beautiful simulated that reconciliation with nature missing from modern bourgeois life.” 4 Twentieth-century postmodern thinkers turned away from the notion of the harmonious and beautiful as they believed that historical and political terror could be represented only through negativity and the unspeakable as encapsulated by the philosophical notion of the sublime. How can you speak of totalitarian terror? Or, how can you account for, or represent, the Holocaust, that unprecedented genocide of the twentieth century? As Adorno declared, after Auschwitz, writing poetry or doing art is inexcusable and barbaric. 5 In this context, the horror and “ugliness” of the real can be illustrated only through the unspeakable, that is, through sublime formlessness.

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To talk about beauty is to touch upon aesthetics, a discipline dating back to the eighteenth century. It is Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten who is traditionally credited with coining the term “aesthetics,” when, in his work Metaphysics (1742), he referred to it as the science of the beautiful. However, Baumgarten treated this “science” as an inchoate form of cognition which was relatively inferior to other, allegedly more solid, disciplines of philosophy. The conceptualization of aesthetics as a distinct category is attributable to Immanuel Kant who saw it as a science aiming at extricating itself from cognition, simultaneously opening itself up to subjective experience, imagination, and individual taste. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant supports the idea that “[a]ll our knowledge begins with experience,” broadening, at the same time, the scope of the latter. 6 Thus, interestingly, aesthetic theory presented itself initially as “a discourse of shock and of shock absorption.” 7 In the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant argues that the beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this “consists in limitation.” The Kantian notion of form is subject to various interpretations insofar as it points to a synthesizing singularity which, however, has recourse to no general concept, as the latter would mar the aesthetic dimension of that singularity. In essence, form opens itself up to formlessness because authentic (or, as Kant would say, “pure”) aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to a specific form, in the same way that the (experience of the) beautiful cannot be pinned down or specified conceptually. 8 Before Kant, Edmund Burke had already introduced a more physiological and primitive version of the beautiful, according to which it is an aesthetic experience that strikes us without any preparation by “seizing upon the senses and imagination, [and] captivate[ing] the soul before the understanding is ready” to react. 9 Burke thus prefigures Kant’s implication that beauty, albeit bounded, is an elusive and fully imaginative non-concept, while the feeling of the beautiful is a subjective sensation which is independent of moral preconceptions, laws, or inhibitions. At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, there was a shift towards the reassessment of beauty and its importance in aesthetic and political matters. The return to beauty, marking a break with the iconoclastic tendencies of postmodern anti-aestheticism prevalent in academic debates from the 1960s to the early 1990s, was facilitated by the growing feeling that beauty was persistently displaced, “quarantined from educated talk,” as Peter Schjeldahl maintained in a New York Times article. 10 Elaine Scarry, with her seminal study On Beauty and Being Just, attempted to do justice to that feeling of displacement by venturing into the beautiful as ethical as well, rather than as purely and strictly aesthetic. From Scarry’s standpoint, beauty may cause a “decentering” of the self which humbles the ego into more ethical and less egotistic behavior. To acknowledge beauty is to cultivate a consensual instinct for justice that helps humans discern a mutual aliveness of things and humans. 11

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Beauty is crucial in ethical and practical matters insofar as it makes “a promise of happiness” for humanity, as has been eloquently argued. 12 The idea that beauty may decenter the self and lead to an ethical and non-egotistic road shares common ground with the conceptualization of beauty as a soul-captivating aesthetic experience that has no precedent in seizing upon imagination and striking without any preparation. Scarry’s discussion of the emergence of beauty as a life-changing experience whose effect upon the human is shocking bears a resemblance to both Kant’s and Burke’s treatment of the feeling of the beautiful as an unprecedented as well as unanticipated sensation that shakes the subject off her confidence in, or her certainties regarding, life. In both cases, the one who experiences the sensation in question remains in awe and incapable of activating cognition and her powers of understanding. Burke, prefiguring Kant, sees beauty as a non-cognitive feeling that catches the individual off guard by energizing uncharted areas of the imagination involving also images of ugliness or experiences of extreme violence. The ethics of such an insight lies in that the aesthetic distance necessary for appreciating episodes or images of ugliness and violence does not keep the subject from involving herself emotionally in the fierceness and “awe-ful” materiality of such episodes. Of course, the closer one gets to horror and atrocity the more redemptive and ethically “decentering” the attitude that one may be forced to adopt, thereby the more appreciative one becomes of the true value of human life. On the other hand, minimum distance from the horrible event ensures that the possibility of subjective pleasure, as a forbidden fascination with the imagistic representation of the event (or even with the event itself), will secretly arise despite the utter immorality of that feeling. Edmund Burke concedes that “at certain distances, and with certain modifications, [danger and pain] . . . are delightful, as we every day experience.” 13 Acts of terrorism and other cases of extreme violence will be seen here through the perspective of disinterested individual fascination as spectacular image events. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two moments of ineffable manmade violence, produced unprecedented images that unquestionably fascinated many of those witnessing the disasters with their own eyes or through film footage, except that only few were willing to acknowledge their fascination; on the contrary, they expressed their horror or, at best, their scepticism regarding the ethical necessity of the deed, while simultaneously repressing or dismissing the aesthetic aspects or impact of it. Similarly, the Lisbon earthquake, probably the event that initiated the discourse of the Enlightenment across the European continent, excited the imagination of entire nations since that was probably the first time in history that the news of a catastrophic event of such magnitude would be so quickly disseminated through not only linguistic accounts but, more importantly, pictorial representations—produced in pamphlets and other

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media of the time. Citizens in Europe as well as across the Atlantic were, at the same time, horrified by, as well as fascinated with those accounts and images for the additional reason that they enabled them to bear witness to an unprecedented disaster as if they were physically present. The earthquake had managed to create a spirit of global empathy with the Lisbon sufferers which was not separable from a latent feeling of relief (or satisfaction) that this lot had befallen Lisbon rather than some other cosmopolitan location in Europe. 14 What is more, the apocalyptic proportions of the catastrophe—the fact, that is, that it seemed as if earth, fire, and water had all conspired to bring a magnificent city to ruin—led to the reinvigoration of the time-old debate over the possibility of divine intervention in earthly matters, while also sparking discussions regarding the aesthetics of the terrifying phenomenon itself—through hints at its novelty in history or its potential “spectacularity.” Τhe unconscious need to aestheticise terror or even bear witness to its covert “beauty” is hardly unethical since it helps us preserve the memory of the terrible through aesthesis rather than reason alone. An eye-opening study that underscores the need for a reappraisal of beauty in such ethically and historically urgent matters as the accurate representation of the Holocaust is offered by Brett Ashley Kaplan who contends that a shift from sublime anti-representation to fully aesthetic and positive representation of Terror is nowadays necessary, insofar as the former is no longer capable of respecting memory, while the latter (aesthetic Holocaust imagery) “creates meaning and therefore opens up a space for” it. In essence, Kaplan announces the inevitable deemphasizing of the (anti-aesthetic) sublime and the empowerment of the beautiful since humanity supposedly does need the radical image that encourages “complex forms of memory work.” 15 In retrospect, even Kant is currently seen as assigning beauty a far more radical quality than we were willing to acknowledge, the quality of an otherness that is beyond comprehension, yet strangely ethical. Beauty is gradually placed at the center of unconventional thought. 16 THE FORBIDDEN IMAGE: TERRORISM, MEMORY, AND DISINTERESTED PLEASURE The problem of beauty is inextricably bound up with the question of the image. Image is an indispensable aesthetic tool that reminds humans of the need to appreciate or comprehend an event through imagination and their own senses rather than simply by resorting to positivist language, written accounts, and logical schemes. The destruction of the World Trade Center in New York “has provided the most memorable image of the twenty-first century so far, destined to join the iconic mushroom cloud [from the twentieth century] as the principal emblem of war and

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terror in our time, leaving behind it a space known as ‘Ground Zero,’ a label that links it (quite inaccurately) to a nuclear bomb.” 17 For Kyo Maclear, images “flare up from the sites of Hiroshima-Nagasaki . . . [l]ending tangible form to intangible events,” thus addressing “the need for historical recollection and understanding, particularly with respect to events of such magnitude.” In other words, when it comes to describing situations of horrendous dimensions, we have to speak louder than ever. She adds, however, that in the specific cases where unspeakable nuclear destruction is involved “simple acts of seeing take on a significance exceeding any apparently simple transparency” by producing “a unique crisis of witnessing.” 18 This kind of crisis is directly connected with the fact that in nuclear disasters there hardly remain any witnesses. Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent unique efforts to erase human presence—and hence, the privilege of testimony—from the face of the earth in a single instant. That mental “picture” cannot be represented in words but still has to be meditated upon if we want to retain our sense of history and ethical justice as well as prevent catastrophe in the future. In a way, an aesthetic appreciation of trauma paradoxically paves the way for doing justice to, and ethically treating, the unprecedented horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also another kind of “crisis of witnessing” at stake. That second kind involves the danger of aesthetic appraisal lapsing into an aesthetic fascination with human trauma and terror. In some strange way, immersing oneself into the aesthetics of nuclear explosion and its aftermath may well render someone complicit in the very act of atrocity. Dominick LaCapra has successfully broached the twentieth-century phenomenon of fascination with excessive violence, or rather with excess itself, by referring to a “blinding ‘traumatropism’ syndrome” to which we “compulsively return.” 19 LaCapra deals with the limits that modern historiography must transgress in order to account for extremely violent events. In essence, he provides the psychological background of the aesthetic “drive” of humanity, which, in turn, explains a lot about the role of beauty in discussing terrorism or large-scale catastrophes. Calling attention to the significance of the image is the key to understanding the power of aesthetics in dealing with terrorist or Holocaust trauma. Seen from this viewpoint, the appreciation of the very form or aesthetic value of historical images is highly likely to do justice to human pain. On the other hand, as one might object, image by itself does not necessarily tell the whole story of human tragedy and terror, not of course because it is unable to tell a story; on the contrary, because at times it tells many different ones that are often in conflict with each other. The potentially conflictual nature of the stories surrounding images is owing to the fact that the latter (images) are usually situated within longer narratives, ideologies and systems of thought that render them ambiguous, unreliable and, depending on the circumstance, more or less shocking. Was a

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photograph of the center of Hiroshima minutes after the atomic explosion just as shocking to Western publics as was a photograph of the Twin Towers in New York crumbling in flames? Similarly, was the image of the plane crashes and the ensuing devastation in downtown Manhattan as shocking and painful to a non-Western audience (an Iraqi, for instance) as, say, a video showing the destructive U.S.-led air raids against Iraq after the launch of the War on Terror campaign? The “challenge is to understand when, how and why images mesh or jar with . . . beliefs and ideologies in the process of mediation between producers and audiences themselves. . . . [I]t is a challenge to deduce what images can be trusted, how images are used by conflict participants, and how journalists and news producers use images to construct relations between events and audiences.” 20 Even if image is intricate and untrustworthy, a persistent engagement with it sharpens rather than blunts an individual’s critical ability by energizing the imagination as well as the aesthetic instinct for unlocking the alternate histories and sentiments surrounding image. The turn to aesthetics encapsulates a “post-metaphysical” (in many senses, a “post-postmodern”) shift of paradigm from the sublime unpresentability of history, posited by postmodern historiography, to the reaffirmation of the beautiful image as decidedly contributing to historical memory. What happens therefore when we start to reflect upon major contemporary problems such as terrorism in terms of the conceptual shift from the sublime to the beautiful? If we took into account the possibility of beauty entering also the question of terrorism, wouldn’t it be an immoral, insensitive, and dangerous thing to do? I argue that it is not. I am proposing the possibility of a forbidden aesthetics entering the discussion of terror(ism), an aesthetics which may not be “moral” in the conventional sense, but it certainly is ethical in a broader sense. For the distinction between morality and ethics I am borrowing Hillis Miller’s own differentiation between moral law and ethical law. Drawing upon Kant, Miller connects morality with human law and ethics with justice: In a sense, you could argue that my imposition on the text is the act of identifying moral with a pre-existing law or habit or whatever. I call that morality, whereas, for me, ethics is always parallel to justice. . . . The word moral is often used in a condescending and in a denigrating way, to name the unreflective following of a moral rule by someone. Such people behave morally but they are not really just or ethical, precisely because they do not think of the unique circumstances. 21

Miller’s conception of the ethical as looking to the unique circumstances for configuring just attitudes is grounded on Kant’s insight, in his seminal work, Critique of Judgement, concerning aesthetic or reflective judgments hinging upon a posteriori assessment. In Kant, a disinterested (and therefore impartial) stance or evaluation cannot be generated through

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moral judgment which is grounded upon a priori rules and thereby cannot allow for the unique and specific circumstance. When Derrida spoke of the “unqualifiable” in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he meant that we were at a loss trying to figure out the exact nature of terror we were dealing with: “Something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don’t know what.” 22 There lurks a negative kind of aesthetics herein. This “negative” statement risks obscuring the potentially positive subjective experience—an aesthetic experience of the beautiful—we may have had of the entire 9/11 visual event or spectacle. In other words, behind the horror and outrage lurked a kind of fascination that most people did have (and do have with respect to other natural or manmade catastrophes) but fail to acknowledge, and that is the forbidden feeling or experience that I intend to problematize in this study. There is already more than enough scholarship on what really happened on the otherwise beautiful morning of September 11, 2001. Beyond doubt, the bulk of the critical responses to the terrorist attacks focused on the ethical and humanitarian, or rather the unethical and inhumane implications of the atrocious act, leaving no room for any philosophical reflection on the potential assessment or reception of the event from the perspective of art and aesthetics. Fifteen years have gone by, and it would be safe to say that this period of time has provided us with some sense of emotional detachment from the horror of that day, a detachment that may have awakened our aesthetic and artistic instincts with regard to the attacks themselves as well as their visual representation. Chronological distance renders an unprejudiced and independent stance more possible now than ever. It also allows us to reconsider our initial politically correct and ethically justified repulsion of the efforts made by a number of artists to aestheticize 9/11. Such repulsion, however, was associated with the delusion that by denouncing aesthetics we were really securing the prevalence of morality and ethical responsibility in a terror-afflicted society. One basic point that I want to make in this project is not simply that there is enough room for aesthetic appreciation but, much more importantly, there is paradoxically a need for aesthetic appreciation when contemplating such violent events as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombings in the middle of the twentieth century, or the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami half way through the eighteenth century. What is more, appreciation of the beautiful seems necessary because it is a key to establishing an ethical stance toward terror, life, and art. It should be stressed that independent aesthetic experience is important in itself, but becomes even more important as a means of cultivating an authentic ethical judgment. Far from engaging in the postmodernist anti-aesthetic take on beauty, the present study adopts an attitude toward the beautiful that could be named “post-aesthetic,” in the sense that it critiques the anti-humanist

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perspective that sees beauty as apolitical and, thus, non-ethical, but without espousing the (modernist) humanist aesthetic tradition preceding postmodernism and the anti-aesthetic, a tradition that separated beauty and aesthetics from so-called “real life” and, in effect, deprived them of the right to mean anything in terms of ethics and personal responsibility. This book concerns acts of distanced appreciation of catastrophe and terrorism. The three watershed events that I have selected are therefore addressed from the standpoint of a more or less remote Western spectator. Almost by definition, distanced appreciation of terror requires that the (remote) spectator is not physically harmed (or in danger of being harmed) during the process of aesthetic appraisal. This is, in fact, the basic reason why one is even granted the opportunity to discern beauty in a context of terror and catastrophe in the first place. Generally, the subjective feeling of the beautiful can hardly be experienced by those directly affected by disaster and terrorism. Positive aesthetic appreciation is naturally out of the question when one is literally in pain, trying to survive through a cataclysmic event of extreme violence. Fascinatingly, however, as this study demonstrates, the aesthetic instinct for the beautiful proves so strong that it may indeed arise even in cases where physical existence itself is jeopardized. These are cases in which it is paradoxically the victims of terror(ism) themselves, not just the victimizers (the perpetrators of terrorist violence), that acknowledge traces of beauty in (what will likely turn out to be their own) destruction. 23 NOTES 1. Virilio emphasizes today’s “fatal confusion between ‘terrorist attack’ and ‘accident,’” and expresses the view that “uncertainty [becomes] a feature of the accident in knowledge. . . . To create an accident rather than an event . . . is a kind of expressionism now universally sought, as much by ‘terrorists’ as by ‘artists’ and all the contemporary activists.” Paul Virilio, City of Panic, trans. Julie Rose (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 27. 2. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87. 3. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 121–44; Jean Francois Lyotard, “Acinema,” trans. Paisley N. Livingston, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 169–80. 4. Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 5. 5. Theodore Adorno, “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 34. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London/ New York: Macmillan, 1963), 41. 7. Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Diacritics 37, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 55–80. Later, in the nineteenth century, the so-called beautiful “migrated away from neoclassical theories of proportion and became the name for a particular sort of subjective experience” that involved the element of surprise (Redfield, 72). 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev., and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), sect. 23, 75. The conflictual

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nature of form and concept removes Kantian aesthetics from the classical imperatives of harmony and unity and relocates it in a more modern tradition of aesthetics spearheaded by such important twentieth-century thinkers as Heidegger, Derrida, Benjamin and Lyotard. See also Samuel Weber, “Clouds: On a Possible Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 88, no. 3 (2013): 345. Moreover, it was Hans-Georg Gadamer who discerned the modern streaks of Kant’s thought as analyzed in the Critique of Judgement, which he saw no longer as elucidating aesthetics as a simple critique of taste. Instead, he saw the work as constituting an act of critiquing critique itself as well as the latter’s legitimacy in matters of taste. See, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [1975] (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 39. 9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 97. Heretofore cited as A Philosophical Enquiry. For Burke, both the sublime and the beautiful catch us off guard by striking without any preparation. 10. Peter Schjedahl, “Beauty Is Back,” New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1996, 16. For information on the postmodernist anti-aesthetic wave in the second half of the twentieth century see Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press, 1983). 11. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For a constructive critique of Scarry’s ideas check out also Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon, eds., The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (London: Tate Publishing, 2008). 12. The phrase “promise of happiness” belongs to Alexander Nehamas’s powerful study of beauty entitled Only the Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 13. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 36–37. As we will see, Burke identifies delight with the feeling of relief. 14. Burke argues that the subject’s satisfaction derives partly from “the contemplation of our own freedom from the evils which we see represented” (41). He is here referring to fictional representations of evil, but the Lisbon earthquake, albeit real, was initially treated like a fictional catastrophe too. For instance, many people in England—including important men like Samuel Johnson—receiving letters with news of the disaster did not believe that an actual tragedy had taken place because of the overdramatic tone and phrases (such as “from the place where Lisbon stood”) used in a great number of those letters. See Edward Paice, Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (London: Quercus, 2008), 134. 15. Bret Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 6. 16. In fact, Kant never intended to assign art’s incomprehensibility or otherness to the category of the sublime, as postmodernism would have it. 17. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Cloning Terror: The War of Images 2001–2004,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello et al. (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 186. 18. Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 1. 19. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits. Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 7. 20. See Ben O’ Loughlin, “Images as Weapons of War: Representation, Mediation and Interpretation,” Review of International Studies 37 (2011): 89. 21. See “On Literature and Ethics: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.” The European English Messenger 15, no. 1 (2006): 27. 22. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 87. 23. For instance, check out my treatment of the frequently ambivalent attitude adopted by certain Japanese survivors of the nuclear Holocaust (chapter 3).

ONE Does Beauty Think? The Scope of Aesthetic Reflection and the Scene of Terror

I address aesthetics in terror and terrorism in two major senses: as the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and as aesthetic/artistic sensibility. In its latter sense, aesthetics “refers to the whole process of human perception and sensation—ideas about the body, imagination, and feeling.” 1 But inextricable from aesthetics as sensory participation or unconscious acknowledgment of beauty in the face of terror and extreme violence is, in my view, the question of ethics, or the very lack of it, when dealing with terrorist or natural catastrophe and the human responses to it. Immanuel Kant is seminal in my analysis insofar as his thought combines two seemingly contradictory postures: on the one hand, aesthetic engagement or involvement with a natural or manmade object, and on the other, aesthetic reflection as a feeling of disinterestedness and impartiality toward that object. Ethics, and more particularly the differentiation between morality and ethical appreciation—as formulated in my introduction— underlies a Kantian-like negotiation with terrorism (and its main constituent, terror) in terms of the subject’s degree of independence from moral imperatives, an independence without which a truly ethical and just attitude toward violence and terror cannot be consolidated. Being free from moral inhibitions is the stepping stone toward establishing a disinterested kind of appreciation. Kant discusses aesthetic disinterestedness in relation to taste by which he means “the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful.” 2 In other words, taste is a personal instinct that tells us at any given 1

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moment whether we “should” or “should not” like a certain object or situation. Such an instinct, according to Kant, cannot have established the rules of liking or disliking beforehand but, rather, forms them in a spontaneous and immediate manner, that is, without the mediation of any interest such as personal desire, prejudice, logic, social imperative or an idea of what is “good” and morally “right.” Taste, then, aspires to a certain kind of impartiality and objectivity which is, paradoxically, aesthetic rather than cognitive, in the sense that it is a subjective axiom and at the same time objective by not relying on interest. Judging an object, representation, or situation by means of taste allegedly constitutes an aesthetic act of freedom, hence an ethical act. The ethical as well as aesthetic value of taste derives from the fact that it represents the imagination and teaches us to find, even in “sensuous” objects, a “free delight” apart from any “charm” of sense. 3 The notion of disinterestedness is crucial for this study on terrorism as it permeates the feeling of the beautiful which, as I argue, is sometimes generated before instances of extreme manmade, or not, violence. Still, disinterestedness is a much debated issue that has been seriously questioned by twentieth-century hermeneutical and deconstructive theories that totally reject the possibility of objective reflection and judgment. As Arnold Berleant maintains: [d]isinterestedness claims both too much and too little. . . . Part of what is problematic about disinterestedness is its dualistic structuring of the aesthetic situation. On the one hand it designates a state of mind, a psychological set that subjectifies aesthetic receptions. In addition to psychologizing appreciation, disinterestedness regards the object of aesthetic perception as separate and independent. Yet both perceiver and object are important but incomplete. 4

If taste, for Kant, is constituted by a freedom of the imagination at the expense of sense or logic as we saw earlier, then Kantian disinterestedness may be capable of overriding the apparent antinomy of an aesthetic reflection which is, at the same time, dispassionate and objective, and still, emotionally engaging and compelling. In this light, disinterestedness emerges as a productive and ethical concept or practice which combines imagination—the freedom of the individual to discern beauty by activating all the senses—and aesthetic distance—to make an aesthetic judgment that will be independent of prejudice, fear, morality and conventional reasoning (all of whom tend to blunt sensibility and stifle the autonomy of taste since they pertain to the realm of practical interests). Such a conception of disinterestedness, pointing simultaneously to an emotionally involved as well as distanced attitude, is particularly useful for the elucidation of the idea of forbidden beauty in the context of terrorism and in light of a free and, thus, ethical appreciation of terrorist violence.

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The judgment that something is beautiful is a disinterested one. Kant tells us that beauty is actually the only disinterested kind of delight. As he adds, the pleasure in the beautiful is: neither a pleasure of enjoyment nor of an activity according to law . . . but rather of mere reflection. Without any guiding-line of end or principle this pleasure attends the ordinary apprehension of an object by means of the imagination . . . and through the operation of a process of judgment which has also to be invoked in order to obtain the commonest experience. 5

Since the pleasure of the beautiful is not an end-oriented “activity” that complies with either moral law or reasoning but, rather, a matter of pure reflection, it follows that its serious consideration when addressing the critical issue of terror and terrorist violence is neither unethical nor implausible. As I will explain in chapter two, the video footage of the September 11 terrorist attacks may certainly have horrified all distant viewers witnessing the unprecedented atrocity from the safety of their homes (horror being indeed the moral and humane thing to feel); on the other hand, the very image of the catastrophe, as representation, potentially generated in the spectators an inexplicable feeling of the strangely enthralling and a kind of pleasure at the sight of something unprecedented, very similar to the Kantian pleasure of the beautiful. Such a kind of morally “forbidden” attraction to images of terrorist catastrophe is by no means unrelated to Edmund Burke’s notion of delight as a feeling of relief (rather than positive pleasure) at the remote spectator’s realization that she is not harmed during the act of bearing witness to catastrophe; rather, it is others that are suffering. Yet, individual fascination with unprecedented destruction and its images cannot be accounted for adequately through the framework of Burkean delight. In fact, the latter, in my view, has the tendency to repress potentially positive feelings that it cannot allow for, feelings lurking behind the moral condemnation of atrocity and involving the pure and unmediated admiration of something inconceivable as well as new unfolding before their eyes. To explain that admiration one should have to resort to Kant’s insights concerning the beautiful, a category of delight which is disinterested, and therefore, dissociable from the totally “interested” form of Burkean delight. 6 A basic point of this study is that to refrain from acknowledging the possible latency of the beautiful or the visually compelling in our reflections upon the critical issue of terrorism and extreme violence is a conventionally moral but unethical act. The origin of this paradox lies in the differentiation between moral/human law and ethical justice (espoused by Hillis Miller and elaborated upon in my introduction). According to human law, reflecting aesthetically upon the form of a terrorist outrage is immoral; by contrast, according to (the unwritten “laws” of) ethical justice, what is absolutely immoral is to not acknowledge the indispensabil-

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ity of the aesthetic dimension when representing terrorism: for instance, the importance of imagination for comprehending, via the senses, the magnitude of a terrorist incident. An ethical treatment of terrorism will not just make allowances for the aesthetic as an unavoidable by-product of terrorism; on the contrary, it will unwaveringly emphasize the very necessity of an aesthetic appreciation of terrorism as a mode of understanding the phenomenon emotionally and not just cognitively. In addition, an ethical treatment of terrorist disaster requires that an individual have the freedom to acknowledge and accept the—natural, yet morally unacceptable and reprehensible—instinct for the aesthetically powerful and the beautiful. An ethical attitude that appears disengaged from morality, prejudice and other interests is implied in Kant’s insight concerning what he calls “reflective/aesthetic” judgment which he juxtaposes to a “moral/determinant” (or determining) one: “If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. . . . If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgment is simply reflective.” 7 Determinant judgment is based on a priori conditions; therefore, something, for example, beautiful is appreciated as such in accordance with some laws that precede or pre-empt it. Reflective or aesthetic judgment, on the other hand, is based on a posteriori assessment; therefore the beautiful is not a matter of prescribed rules but of spontaneous subjective reaction. Aesthetic judgment seems to be more autonomous and less prejudiced since it does not apply ready-made rules to the object of beauty but rather waits for the object to happen and then, after the fact, invents the specific rules that will assess it as beautiful at that particular moment. In other words, real beauty, according to Kant, may be discerned through aesthetic judgment because this kind of judgment remains unaffected by any mental preconceptions or moral inhibitions carried by an individual prior to witnessing a work of art or a non-art object. The tricky part in reading terror through a Kantian take on beauty is that, contrary to what is generally thought, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, at least for Kant. What this entails is that one would have to give an objective twist to the already provocative idea or feeling that there might be anything beautiful at all in terrorist events. Even though the pleasure of the beautiful is an inherently subjective—hence, aesthetic—feeling, it presumes (or, better, demands) a general consensus, a sensus communis, which will supposedly substantiate its universality and objectivity. In other words, the beautiful in terrorism should be considered to be so by everyone else: “For where one is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent of interest, it is inevitable that he should judge the object as one containing a ground of delight for all human beings.” 8 Kant here insists indeed that one will speak of the beau-

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tiful as if beauty were objective and integral to the object of appreciation and the judgment were thus absolutely logical. Sensus communis is a key term in aesthetic reflection. This is how Kant defines it: it is “the idea of a public sense, i.e., a faculty of judging which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else. . . . This is accomplished by weighing the judgment . . . with the merely possible” judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else. 9 In essence, what Kant says is that there must be something “subjectively universal” about an aesthetic judgment (it must be at the same time subjective and objective) to the extent that such a judgment is made by a subject who simultaneously imagines an entire community as sharing the same or similar (subjective) view. 10 Aesthetic reflection is an a posteriori operation that presumes unconsciously the a priori consent of the others. The impact of such an assumption or demand when it comes to terrorism is serious insofar as an entire intellectual community, not just a person, is called upon to concede the aesthetic value of a terrorizing scene—say, the destruction of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks in the United States, or the mushroom cloud arising out of the nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and, in that way, turn that scene into an objectively beautiful or attractive one. On the other hand, one might object, Kant always puts an emphasis upon the usefulness of the almost poetic or rhetorical phrase “as if,” thereby combining the real with the imagined, the true with the possible. For example, he insinuates that aesthetic/reflective judgment operates as if its reflections and feelings about a situation were shared by all; from which one gathers that they may or may not be (shared by all). Even if aesthetic judgments are universally valid it does not mean that everyone will deem a certain object beautiful since such a claim would point to a logical argument mediated by concepts. Instead, it would presume a peculiar kind of “normativity” which lacks a conceptually clear “prescription.” 11 Imagination and the aesthetic as sense perception play an important role in Kant’s insight according to which the pleasure of the beautiful and any other kind of reflective judgment should be valid (but not prescriptively) for everyone as logical—hence universal—truths that are based upon an idea of common sense. Sensus communis is legitimately interpreted as “common sense” in Kantian scholarship, but this does not prevent us (in accordance with the mentality of the “as if”) from looking at it as a sensibility which is not even, strictly speaking, common but, rather, shared by a limited community—Kant has in mind a wider group of Western intellectuals and learned, cultivated individuals. Furthermore, sense might very well be seen as logic and sensibility—a mere impression or feeling that sounds logical and is thus taken to be almost “objectively” true. To apply the idea of common sense to the appreciation of terrorism is to call attention to the almost universally accepted aesthetic underlying

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an act of terror, whether that be a manmade event or a case of natural catastrophe. Using our common sense requires that we both speak/think for ourselves and, paradoxically, speak/think as if we were others (consequently placing ourselves in the shoes of others by imagining the others’ point of view). If by appealing to sensus communis we are making a case for the aesthetic powerfulness of a scene of terror, as form or representation, in the eyes of outsiders and distant spectators, we are not adopting a moral or determinant stance that would (pre)determine our viewpoint prejudicially as well as pre-emptively. We are employing our own (but still universally shared or imagined) aesthetic of taste, an act which is not “moral” strictly speaking, but which is definitively ethical insofar as it derives its legitimacy from the feeling of personal freedom of judgment. The freedom of reflecting aesthetically upon issues related to terror and (images of) extreme violence is an indispensable condition, a serious prerequisite, of consolidating a responsible and ethical attitude toward such critical matters. ETHICS AND THE AESTHETICS OF IMAGINING In the beginning of the chapter we conceptualized the aesthetic, first as the aesthetic appreciation of the beautiful, and second, as an instance of sheer “aesthesis” or sensibility in terms of an uninterrupted engagement of the senses for the appraisal of a terrorist incident. Built into the discussion of aesthetics and terrorism, as far as this book is concerned, is the question of ethics as ethical justice rather than human law or individual morality. To ethically represent and do justice to (but without, of course, justifying) the phenomenon of terrorism one needs to resort to the noncognitive—and therefore, non-rationalizing—faculty of aesthetics as “immediate aesthetic response” to specific scenes and acts of terror, while abstaining from a strictly moral attitude based upon already given universal rules dictated by abstract human laws. If aesthetics is the “science” of the immediate (or the unmediated), it becomes absolutely necessary in the investigation of the affinity between ethics and terror. Kant’s idea of reflective judgment as an act of judging that takes us from the particular to the universal (without the latter turning into a concept or prescriptive law) could very well initiate an ethical effort to represent justly the pain and horror during an event of terror. How? By concentrating in a reflective manner upon the image of horror as such, we are enabled to think responsibly about the nature of humanity and the importance of keeping intact the memory of violence perpetrated against the human. Moreover, reflection as disinterested and impartial judgment of the specific and the unique might also open up fis-

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sures for the intrusion of the beautiful and the visually appealing in the face of terror and destruction. Despite the ostensible oxymoron of speaking of the aesthetic and the ethical in the same breath, one cannot but concede the social and profoundly humanitarian value of aesthetic/reflective appreciation, especially when one is called upon to evaluate a situation of social injustice or, more critically, when one is expected to address terrorist violence in such a way as to avoid rationalizing and normalizing it by making it fit into universal moral categories. Therefore, when we are faced with a terrorist catastrophe involving the loss of innocent human lives, it would be too dangerous to shrug it off by blaming it, for instance, on the dehumanizing political and historical conjuncture or thinking it through typical or conventional models of thought wasting their energy on how “immoral” and “evil” a certain terrorist act is, or stereotypical declarations about how such things should never happen again, and so on. The important thing is to avoid generalizations (that are symptomatic of the predominance of moral imperatives) and, instead, start sensing the utter inhumanity of terrorist atrocity by focusing upon the image of terror and thereby imagining the ineffable pain and despair implicit in the victims’ cries of horror. In a world such as ours, which is suffused with virtual or real images of blood and death, it is imperative that the uniqueness and singularity of each and every act of terror be made clear and, more significantly, felt deeply rather established rationally and cognitively. 12 Kant’s aesthetics shows us the way to establishing an ethical attitude towards terrorism, and that is by means of disinterested reflection, which, in our case, implies grappling with the terrorist image as well as the very act of violence as if they were unprecedented and unrepeatable rather than part and parcel of an entire politics or ideology of destabilization, which would point to the commonality, normalcy, or even banality of terrorism. In fact, one should reflect upon the terrorist image as though one’s own life depended on it, even if one is, what we would call, a “remote” (and disinterested) spectator, who has not been physically affected by the act of terrorism. For Kant, making an aesthetic judgment amounts to reflecting a posteriori, hence in a detached, objective, and unprejudiced way, upon the unique form of an event or circumstance. Aesthetic judgment is . . . aesthetic because it relies upon the operation of personal taste. An unprejudiced kind of reflection or judgment is therefore contingent upon the degree to which a person makes use of her own taste to decide how she will act in a specific situation. According to Kant, acting or reacting tastefully rather than tastelessly involves thinking for oneself (and not clinging to pre-determined rules about how one should think) and thinking from the point of view of everyone else—which lays the foundation for a broadened and enlarged thought. 13 To think independently (for oneself) and simultaneously from the standpoint of all others (in a non-egotistic fashion) amounts to empa-

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thizing with others while retaining one’s own selfhood. Doubtless, this simultaneity presumes, but also entails, an increased sensitivity to the others’ pain or tragedy, an array of empathic feelings ignited by the aesthetic instinct, or simply, personal taste. In other words, we need to activate our aesthetic instincts and employ our sense of taste if we want to truly understand and empathize with the plight of the human in the context of terror and unthinkable atrocity. The underlying assumption here is that failure to act tastefully, that is, according to our very own aesthetic instincts results in cruelty and an unethical kind of passivity before injustice and terror. Hillis Miller’s take on Kant’s differentiation between determinant and reflective judgment empowers an ethical attitude toward terrorism. Miller, more particularly, identifies morality—which he translates as the unreflective following of a moral rule—as the inflexible and, consequently, unethical application of a strict law that does not attend to the unique circumstances in relation to an object of appreciation but rather adapts unproductively the latter to its own premises and prejudices. In this light, to adjust the particular to the universal a priori (moral judgment) seems a fundamentally unfree kind of behavior, by contrast to the act of prioritizing the particular over the universal (aesthetic judgment) which favors an a posteriori reflection that allows an individual to decide for herself the rules that underlie a particular kind of judgment. In my view, Miller’s notion of ethical justice is inextricably bound up with aesthetics insofar as, on the one hand, it is not cognitive or rational, while on the other, it relies immensely upon inventiveness and the faculty of imagination. We have to invent the rules that suit the unique circumstance, in the sense of making them up as we go along. Imagining the rules through the activation of our aesthetic (as well as artistic) instincts helps us re-establish connection with our own spontaneous and feeling selves, and by extension, with the feelings and humanity of the others. Imagination and taste think reflectively and impartially and they never predetermine the object of their reflection because that would amount to betraying the very logic of imagining. Joseph Margolis credits Kant with leaving the question open as to exactly how one should behave or think in practical circumstances: Kant, I would say, is stronger than Aristotle in at least one regard: he never actually states what is substantively right or obligatory in the way of how we should act in specific practical circumstances. He does not attempt to demonstrate any determinate (categorical) obligation as objectively binding in these or those circumstances. . . . In this way, Kant preserves the rational freedom of morally autonomous agents. . . . [We are not] obliged to act, here and now. . . . We are not even obliged to tell the truth. . . . [Moreover], if someone offers a maxim for acting in one way in given circumstances, another may offer a different maxim. . . . 14

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An individual does not necessarily have to act or reflect upon a practical situation, and that is what constitutes her Kantian freedom, as Margolis admits. But when the individual does take to aesthetic reflection she is allegedly doing it rationally, which, in the case at hand, does not mean in accordance with a hard-and-fast rule but rather by attuning oneself to common sense, that is, the possible sensibilities and emotions of all others—in short, by listening to the “rational” mind. Regardless of whether Margolis is right or wrong in his claim that Aristotle, contrary to Kant, prescribes what an ethical kind of behavior actually consists of, it is beyond doubt emotion that drives us to make an ethical and mature judgment, that is, one that respects the human and retains human dignity by attending to the unique circumstance: “Maturity in Kant has to do with courage. . . . A mature agent is one who dares to use her own understanding. In Aristotle maturity is about judging adequately in situations. On both accounts emotions seem to be constituent to reasoned judgment. . . . In both cases, emotions are basic to judging about what matters in particular cases.” 15 What is needed then is a certain degree of emotional maturity to be able to judge what an appropriate behavior will be, depending on the circumstance. For Kant, it was precisely man’s emergence from his self-inflicted immaturity that marked the beginnings of the Enlightenment. Immaturity, that is, the inability to use one’s own understanding “without the guidance of another,” is selfinflicted if the individual lacks the resolution to use it without someone else’s assistance. 16 Nevertheless, emotional maturity is not something that we conjure magically out of a hat like a rabbit. To reach a state of emotional maturity one needs first to cultivate one’s own empathic potential, in order not to just feel for the others but also understand the others’ position. As already argued in an eloquent way, empathy is affective and cognitive “because it requires both the cognitive ability to discern what a situation might look like from another’s perspective and the emotional capacity to imagine the feelings that might arise from that perspective.” 17 In my view, whereas the cognitive and the affective should be jointly considered, it is the affective and aesthetic quality of empathy in its original Greek sense of being in pathos (pathos not as the rhetorical means of persuasion alongside logos and ethos) that actually connects us to our role as social beings—organisms functioning in the society of others—and more importantly, as beings in touch with the passions, fears and hopes of others. Attaining what Kant names “enlarged” thought, making allowances for another’s feelings and thoughts, is therefore inextricable from empathy as the fusion of the affective and the cognitive (the former laying the foundations for the latter). From this follows that to responsibly grapple with issues of terrorism and political violence we must be able to approximate the pain of the victims of terrorism by imagining what it would

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really feel like being in their place. Feeling and imagining are inherently aesthetic processes that may lead to an ethically meaningful negotiation not merely of questions of representation in terrorism but also questions of political tactic in opposing terrorism per se. The act of imagining oneself in, of projecting oneself onto, the other is nothing less than bearing witness, in a dramatic and “synaesthetic” way, to the unforgettable image of catastrophe; an image that must not be erased from memory because it accumulates within itself all the possible signs of justice for humanity. But isn’t there also something beautiful—in the sense of the “pleasurable”—lurking in the aforementioned fusion of the cognitive and the affective/aesthetic in the context of terrorism? Kant insinuates that there is always something pleasurable in the free interplay of imagination and the understanding even when the object of appraisal is something ugly or “formless.” The reason is, as has been succinctly said, “if it is to be an object, an ugly object cannot be so chaotic that it in no way conforms to the understanding.” 18 So when the two faculties are employed in the appreciation of terrorist atrocity, the positivity intrinsic to the pleasurable interplay will affect also the ways we look at terrorism and its representations. In other words, we get to feel a certain amount of satisfaction when our spontaneous sentiments before scenes of terror combine with ideas and cognitive schemas that we had unconsciously assimilated beforehand. 19 Forbidden aesthetics arises from the publicly unacknowledged feeling that there can be beauty in the “chaotic object” and its representations, despite the obvious immorality of such an utterance, because aesthetic judgment does not preclude (on the contrary, it enforces) the disinterested reflection on the terrifying but visually compelling object. POLITICS, ETHICS, AND THE BEAUTIFUL This is by no means a book on politics. This is a book on aesthetics and its ethical ramifications in issues regarding terror and terrorism in Western culture. However, questions of political nature arise, indeed, when peering into the practice of aesthetic or reflective judgment. Politics, in the Aristotelian sense of actively and responsibly participating in, and passing free judgment upon, matters of the polis (the city) could be the ethical basis for this project. In such an ethico-political framework, the subject or the citizen reflects, in a passionate yet disinterested fashion, upon critical issues of the community using her instincts or, to put it in a Kantian language, her sense of taste—this “feeling of contemplative pleasure”— rather than a set of predetermined rules that cloud a person’s judgment with prejudice and a priori moral laws. Kant’s concept of reflective judgment potentially offers glimpses of the aesthetic both, as ethical and polit-

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ical in the Aristotelian sense. In fact, that is the reason why the two terms are frequently used interchangeably throughout the book. Hannah Arendt has famously demonstrated how Kant’s aesthetic or reflective judgment has serious ethical and political connotations. 20 More specifically, she elaborated upon how we could find in aesthetic reflection the origins of political judgment. 21 However, it is her treatment of imagination that may serve as a model for how aesthetic judgment and even the pleasure of the beautiful can forge an ethical consciousness. Arendt talks about how imagination renders the others present and enables critical thinking to expand onto wider areas that are not private but public, thus enabling also the creation of Kant’s “world citizen.” To think with a broadened mind, she argues, entails training the imagination to wander around in various places. Imagination and the senses prepare the subject for the operation of reflection, that is, the very act of judgment. During reflective judgment, as she adds, one turns into a “impartial” and “not directly affected” spectator who takes pleasure in the pure form of the object even if that object is not pleasurable by itself. Aesthetic reflection is inevitably an act of pleasure which is based on personal (yet disinterested) taste. 22 Supposing, then, that in the act of aesthetic reflection we are indulging in the image or representation of an object which typically should not be seen as pleasurable or beautiful, aren’t we simultaneously treading in morally dangerous waters? If we were to comply with Kant’s concept of moral/determinant judgment grounded upon moral laws and precepts established in advance, we would have to denounce the practice of judging to be beautiful something that should not be viewed as such, due to a preexisting law that dictated that a positive judgment, with regard to the particular object, be morally reprehensible. The very sensitive issue of terrorism would be a case in point. For instance, not just the thing itself— the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001—but also its representations or reproductions on the TV or through art were seen by many—not only the authorities but also the general public—as embodiments of evil and utterly immoral (as I explain in the next chapter), as though an iconoclastic policy—refraining from seeing and looking the other way—could reverse the consequences of the attacks by magically bringing the dead back; or as if playing the spectacular video footage or producing art that commemorated the event could drive spectators to imitate the horrific deed by becoming terrorists themselves. Similarly, not just the scientific experiments during the Manhattan project and the creation of the atomic bomb were immediately or retrospectively seen as immoral (because they were meant to lead to unspeakable horror), but the very images of destruction during nuclear tests, as well as the people bearing witness to those images, were deemed to be morally reprehensible too. Accepting the moral law that judges, a priori, as “immoral” the idea that there might be beauty in the images of terror and terrorism (or in the

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terrorist deeds themselves) does not make us more free and ethical but, rather, more prejudiced and partial. If the beautiful is, in Kantian terms, an end in itself and does not need to explain itself as to why it is beautiful (it might be so due to its novelty, its spectacularity, or the pleasure we derive from gazing at it), it follows that it is unethical, unjust as well as a sign of non-freedom to deny its intrinsic beauty which is spontaneously witnessed and confirmed though cursorily dismissed. An ethical stance, by contrast, would not be bound by moral precepts. Such a stance would flaunt its freedom to speak its mind by openly acknowledging the dynamic of the beautiful sneaking, as a forbidden aesthetic, into the immoral and socially unacceptable scene of terror. Imagination’s role is indispensable at this point, since it represents a realm of non-cognition, nonconceptuality, and, ultimately, irrationality. Imagination, that is, is the vehicle through which the idea of the beautiful will be visualized or fantasized as “image,” but will definitely not be rendered into a concept and thus made into something recognizable by means of cognition or any kind of scientific discourse—even though, if we are to abide by Kant’s thought, it should be communicable and therefore felt as an objective quality in its very subjectivity: namely, as a subjective universality. Arendt traces an almost irresolvable complexity in Kant’s insight concerning aesthetic/reflective judgment: The chief difficulty in judgment is that it is “the faculty of thinking the particular”; but to think means to generalize, hence it is the faculty of mysteriously combining the particular and the general. This is relatively easy if the general is given—as a rule, a principle, a law—so that the judgment merely subsumes the particular under it. The difficulty becomes great “if only the particular be given for which the general has to be found.” For the standard cannot be borrowed from experience and cannot be derived from outside. I cannot judge one particular by another particular. 23

To think does not necessarily mean to “generalize” as Arendt has it. But even if it does mean that, thinking is not the term we are looking for when it comes to aesthetic judgment; it is, rather, reflecting that interests us; reflection via the senses (as “aesthesis”), namely reflecting aesthetically upon an object and its representation. Aesthetic judgment depends upon personal taste and aesthetic sensibility and therefore cannot depend upon given universals. If it could, the judgment would be fairly easy, according to Arendt. But the problem is that aesthetic judgment looks to the particular, rather than the general, for discovering, or rather inventing the universal. Well, the fascinating element that underlies aesthetic judgment is precisely its concentration upon the particular for which the universal (or the rule) will be found in the future. 24 Aesthetic reflection relies on its sensory power, the dynamics of the senses rather than intellect or cognition, in order to make a spontaneous judgment, one that will not be

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censored by general rules and prejudices related to certain moral interests. What Arendt finds difficult and tricky in Kant’s insights concerning aesthetic judgment might likely lay the groundwork for the cultivation of a democratic instinct during the act of judging. How would such an instinct come about? To explain how, we would have to revert to Hillis Miller’s theory regarding the difference between human law and ethical justice. As we have seen, Miller associates human law with moral law and judgment that attend, almost blindly, to the general and thereby do not do justice to the unique circumstances of an event that would require humans to act by judging differently—according to independent personal feeling. On the other hand, Miller associates ethical justice with individual judgment that attends to the unique circumstance for formulating a just and ethical proposition with regard to an object or situation. The idea is that the particular circumstance may not be directly applied to the general law, because the latter may not have anticipated any potentially “special” or extraordinary features that probably apply to specific cases and circumstances only. To put it plainly, the object or situation under inspection may be so novel and innovative that completely new rules should have to be invented for it. Miller and Arendt react similarly in deriving an “aesthetic” of democracy and an ethical aesthetics from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. What is at stake in that ethical aesthetics is (the question of) human dignity. Both thinkers believe that human dignity and integrity cannot be secured by moral law, but only by individual judgment that judges differently according to circumstance by building upon a personal feeling of ethical justice—something like an unwritten law that gets rewritten as we speak and act. Arendt felt that the idea of reflective judgment was ethical by virtue of its connection with (personal) aesthetic judgment and taste, which draws upon one’s own sense of freedom that lets one reinvent continually the content of the terms “human values.” Judgment was evidently seen as aesthetic by Arendt who investigated the very lack of it in critical political conjunctures. One of the most impressive inferences that she makes is that lack of judgment is very frequently responsible for the intrusion of evil in human affairs. The “case study” for substantiating such a claim was, famously, the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi criminal connected with the so called “final solution,” the mass extermination of the Jewish population. Arendt attended the trial and concluded that the lack of personal judgment among the Nazi officials had led to such an ethical debasement that the entire edifice of morality in Nazi Germany was gradually crushed under the “banality” of the bureaucratic state machine. The infamous phrase “banality of evil,” coined by Arendt, meant to demonstrate that the Nazi terror should not be facilely attributed to anti-Semitism and racism, but had its origins in a much more prosaic understanding of reality, an

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understanding that was permeated by a banal and largely amoral (rather than “immoral”) wish to obey the rules of the authority and succumb to the will of the German state. 25 Arendt generally rethinks, in a radical way, the mentality and condition of the human against the background of totalitarian Terror as a force of banal evil that refuses to discern the moral from the just. 26 Succumbing uncritically to the impersonal will of the Nazi propaganda was identical to following the prescriptive rules of moral (human) law—and obeying the rules of determinant judgment—without really engaging the faculty of personal judgment, which is based upon one’s own senses, aesthetic criteria and taste, to make the best out of what would turn out to be a moral dilemma of “killing” or “not killing.” In this light, the Nazi crimes revealed the lack of freedom to create new, humanitarian, values that would go against the old prescriptive ones in alignment with the unique and novel circumstance summarized as “millions of people awaiting their inconceivable evaporation.” The moral law of the final solution was thus prioritized over what would be seen as the new value of “respecting human dignity” in the face of the established moral law of extermination. Removing the smokescreen of the moral imperative of human law (the laws of the state, for instance, or the moral injunctions of the “leader”), we are left with the aesthetic of pain and pleasure in the raw. If the Nazi officer or any other terror-inducing agency, including terrorist organizations, were capable of feeling the ethical catastrophe of mass murder and truly sensing the aesthetic of pain experienced by those victimized, they would most probably have retrieved from within themselves the long-lost seed of humanity, compassion, and empathy and they would have attempted to save the victims against all moral prescription. To put it simply, aesthetics would have converted them into real ethical beings always on the alert for inventing ever-new rules that would raise the bar as to what we mean today by the word “humanity.” Paradoxical as it may sound, such an ethics-oriented aesthetics would be advanced not by a moral precept or rational concept but by the pure pleasure of the beautiful and the aesthetically attractive. As Kant informs us, the beautiful is the only disinterested kind of delight, while aesthetic judgment, as the ability to reflect upon a situation by retrospectively inventing new rules that correspond to the particular circumstances, could be viewed as calling attention to the unique aesthetics of solidarity by means of heightening, rather than blunting, the sensibilities. Doesn’t the practice of aesthetic judgment call attention also to the feeling of beauty or pleasure that emerges once the particular finds its analogue in a newly formed universal (or rule), which, however, will never be elevated to an actual concept, thus necessarily assuming a fixed form? 27 Such an oscillation or in-between-ness—searching for the possible universal concept and resisting that search due to the realization that the

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concept is rather unattainable—which permeates Kant’s view of reflective appreciation in The Critique of Judgement (or Critique of Moral Taste, as it was first named), foreshadowed later negotiations of the Kantian disjunction between the autonomy of the moral law and the practical flexibility (or potentially, “immorality”) of politics such as, for instance, the Derridean negotiation of the rupture between ethics and politics. In “Toward Perpetual Peace,” Kant argues that there is “objectively (in theory) no conflict at all between morals and politics,” quickly adding that “subjectively . . . this conflict will and may remain in force” owing to people’s egoism. 28 In effect, he never thinks as too probable that there will indeed be a perpetual peace in the future. Still, the categorical imperative has to be retained against all odds because people need to keep on working in the direction of perpetual peace, even though such an upshot is rather unlikely. We need to behave as if the scenario of “peace” were very likely, and the possible concept of eternal peace were to become a real and certain one. That is exactly the ethico-political dynamic that was picked upon by Derrida who supported the view that the most successful rule would be to find “the best (or in any case the least bad) that would answer to contradictory imperatives in a single gesture.” 29 The free play between the particular (the political) and the universal (the moral or ethical) implicit in both Kant and Derrida announces the advent of the beautiful— for instance, the beautiful resolution of conflict—by means of a free vacillation between imagination and concept: from imagining the pleasure of attaining the universal to acting as if it were possible to reach it. It is precisely the hypothetical and tentative combination of the two that evokes a feeling of pleasure at the sight of (the form of) the aforementioned “beautiful” resolution. As I will argue in the chapters on the different versions of terrorism that follow, beauty, as portrayed by Kant, has a form which is not really a form, and the pleasure in it stems from its enticingly amorphous state as well as its nonconceptual dimension as a purposeless entity: beauty is beautiful for no plausible or implausible reason at all. Likewise, the beauty of judging aesthetically lies, first, in the pure reflection upon the very form of the particular circumstance (which may be of critical importance or not); second, in the taste to act upon the uniqueness of the circumstance; and, third, the realization that any chosen action will not or should not be seen as a pretext for inaugurating strict universal laws. After all, we should not overlook the power of the “as if” in Kant’s philosophy: in other words, we should act as if we were seeking the universal for every particular situation; not that we are seriously expecting to find such a universal.

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THE BEAUTIFUL, NOT THE SUBLIME: TOWARD AN AESTHETICS OF FREEDOM As I already explained in the introduction, this work is highly suspicious of the anti-aesthetic and postmodern attempt to treat the sublime—as nonrepresentation, iconoclasm, and silence in the face of unspeakable terror and terrorism—as an ethical and emancipatory stance that supposedly does justice to history, memory, and the possibility of freedom. Moreover, the work is equally skeptical of postmodernist tendencies to consider the beautiful and its representations as utterly apolitical and unethical due to their alleged claim to an imaginary harmoniousness that does not make any sense in a world of chaos, conflict, and terror such as ours. It is not the beautiful but, rather, the sublime that shows signs of an apolitical mentality (again, in the Aristotelian sense of the citizen’s interaction as well as interference with society and the administration of the polis) and reserves a position of fundamental unfreedom for the individual. Allusions to such a mentality pointing away from freedom have been made by such preeminent thinkers of the sublime as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, who paved the way for twentieth-century theorizations and elaborations of it by philosophers like Arendt, Derrida, and Lyotard. For both Burke and Kant, the sublime is about the feeling of terror. However, it is mostly in the former that the sublime implies total helplessness and an inevitable passivity before the terrible object. In essence, for Burke the sublime is the announcement of the dwarfing presence of death before which the subject paralyses: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime. . . . [N]ay, what generally makes pain itself . . . more painful, is, that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors [death]. 30

It is fairly obvious that Burke’s account of sublimity is shot through with images of terror and unbearable pain. His definition of the sublime is rather “physiological” insofar as he concentrates upon the sensory impact of the terrifying object upon the viewer. What is sublime in nature is not only capable of terrifying the subject, it also has the power to engulf it in utter despair by making it realize that terror is just the first ominous step towards an agonizing death. Terror, then, prefigures the coming of pain which, in turn, will lead one to her certain death. Kant’s understanding of the sublime implicates the intellect and the mind much more than it does the soul. It forces us to consider questions of form and its cognitive assimilation as its “ultimate genesis.” 31 If Burke’s conception of sublimity gives off an air of pessimism and submission, Kant’s own take on it is far more ambiguous in that it combines the

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pain of helplessness with the hope of transcendence. For him, the feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure arising from the inability of the imagination to grasp the concept of sheer magnitude, combined with pleasure arising from this very “judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.” 32 In the following passage, Kant approximates Burke, his predecessor, insofar as he touches upon the question of physicality: [T]he irresistibility of the might of nature forces upon us the recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature, but at the same time reveals a faculty of judging ourselves as independent of nature, and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation. . . . Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature. 33

For Kant, the sublime is not the terrible or frightening in nature but our own resistance to it. In this light, what appears terrifying and threatening we assume that we will eventually manage to contain and rise above through our faculty of reason and our superior intellect. Of course, in order to make those assumptions, we need to have established some aesthetic or physical distance so that our own physical existence is not jeopardized. So, the Kantian sublime re-enacts the fantasy of winning out over death and, in this respect, it constitutes a much less pessimistic attitude than Burke’s own. The fact remains, though, that such a kind of sublime, just like in Burkean aesthetics, is an inherently subjective condition (in the sense of referring to the subject’s inner world and mind) by contrast to the feeling of the beautiful which, as a feeling “of the furtherance of life” and thus “compatible with charms and a playful imagination,” is social, communicable and consensual through and through. 34 Although, as I demonstrate in a later chapter (chapter 4), Kant’s notion of sublimity is not too far from his notion of the beautiful—indeed, at times he appears to be treating the sublime as if it were beautiful 35—it admittedly comprises the element of introverted-ness which might lead to isolation and resignation from a social and empathic kind of existence—the characteristic of aesthetic reflection and the beautiful. If we can make such a case for Kant, we can definitely make a similar case for Burke’s interpretation of the sublime as overwhelming terror before the threat of death. 36 The possibility of political apathy and unethical, passive silence is latent in the feeling of sublime, especially when the latter is contextualized as “sublime bureaucratic terror” or sublime state terror. This is how Richard Kearney connects the condition of sublimity with the condition of the terrorized subject in state terrorism (totalitarianism) as well as anti-state terrorism and violence: The sublime induces a freedom of indifference which can actually lead to political un-freedom—a sort of complicity with the impersonal ad-

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Chapter 1 ministration of our universe by Party, Movement, or State. . . . The sublime . . . does not connect us to any kind of universal narrative empathy. Rather it draws us away from what Kant called “aesthetic reflective judgment” and shatters our sensus communis. 37

If beauty is moral (although “ethical” is probably a more appropriate term), as Kant thinks, it has to be on account of its reliance on the taste, common sense, and sensibilities of an imagined community. By contrast, sublimity, translated as the awe that the subject feels before the dehumanizing violence of totalitarian terror, may lead to an unethical and, in many senses, un-political or anti-political condition characterized by inertia, apathy, and ultimately, complicity with state violence, which more often than not slips into an aesthetic attraction to the entire totalitarian machine. Arendt read into the subject’s complicity an aesthetic mood of ontological “dislocation” and of sublime disengagement from real horror, accompanied by the stifling of the senses, the blurring of critical judgment and the repression of the imaginative faculty. 38 We have to keep in mind that for both, Kant and Burke, sublimity is a condition of the mind rather than an objective exteriority, and therefore, the person suffering that sublime detachment is a person cut off from the enlivening forces of social togetherness and empathy, and also one that is ready to embrace in silence the terrorist tactics of the state by projecting herself upon the latter’s impersonal bureaucratic institutions. Sublime detachment and apathy are clearly juxtaposed to an empathic dislocation which could be defined as feeling for the other and simultaneously being aware of one’s own place. Through this lens, while empathic dislocation hinges on the aesthetic, sublime “settlement” or detachment hinges on the “anaesthetic”—a selfabsorbed insensitivity stemming from an unwillingness to judge. If beauty has a role, then, it is to cut through that sublime apathy and resurrect personal taste and judgment—indispensable tools for addressing adequately the question of terrorist aesthetics as well as problematizing the relation between ethics and terrorism. When Scarry insists that the beautiful “prompts the mind to move chronologically back in search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring new things into relation,” she is virtually attributing to the beautiful image the anarchist principle of transgressing laws of propriety and conventional morality by bringing together unlawful schemas and forbidden sensations via the uninhibited activation of imagination. 39 The anarchist aesthetic of beauty finds its ideal example in looking at the image of catastrophe as a beautiful and attractive one. The recognition of our fascination with the stunning image of terror is arguably a sign of true freedom. It may be proof of our freedom to acknowledge beauty where there should be none, since how can there be a single trace of the beautiful in such

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unprecedented acts of terror as a nuclear bombing or a terrorist strike, even if the very image of that strike looks aesthetically appealing? Or, how can we find beauty in natural catastrophes of biblical proportions involving the excruciating death of several thousand people, even if we are to appreciate aesthetically the very form of the catastrophe as a visual singularity? The freedom to immorally or illogically discern the beautiful in the face of destruction is an indirect emanation, for instance, from Kant’s idea that the immediate pleasure in the beautiful in nature presupposes a certain liberality of thought and represents freedom “as in play” rather than as exercising a lawful activity where reason necessarily imposes itself upon sensibility and imagination. 40 Such a liberality of thought is alluded to, rather inchoately, by Edmund Burke who touches upon the beautiful as the object of an unconscious, physiological procedure rather than of “long attention and enquiry.” Beauty needs no assistance from our reasoning faculty. Even our will is “unconcerned.” 41 Regardless of whether we want it or not, the element of the beautiful might also creep into dead serious matters related to ineffable human and material catastrophe. It is ethical as well as a sign of true independence from human morality (as human law) to be able to recognize and admit the radical latency of the beautiful and the aesthetically appealing even when real human trauma is involved. The key role in such an act of recognition is played by the catastrophic image as a morally forbidden but visually astonishing entity that needs to be aesthetically peered into or born witness to, not only because it provides a true sample of humanity’s voyeuristic tendencies but also because it potentially offers a glimpse into the history of human pain and tragedy. In other words, the image of terror may generate emotions and trigger sensibilities that will secure knowledge of the fact that terror always goes hand in glove with real blood and pain. Ironically, though, to look at the terrifying image and fantasize about the pain of others you need to enframe the image and place it at a distance, thus, in a way, to fictionalize and aestheticize it. Images, fictional/artistic or not, can be shown to be very much alive, as though they assumed a life of their own, contrary to the claim made by postmodern anti-aestheticism that images are dead entities that can only be disrespectful to memory and human life and consequently we should dissect or demystify them through persistent criticism in order to lay bare their inherent deadness and superficiality. In What Do Pictures Want? W. J. T. Mitchell asserts that “magical attitudes toward images are just as powerful in the modern world as they were in so-called ages of faith.” He adds that those attitudes are not something that “we ‘get over’ when we grow up, become modern, or acquire critical consciousness.” 42 Ever since we were infants we had always been enchanted by images, and, not surprisingly, this fascination has remained intact in our adulthood. Today, the power of the image is stronger than ever and we can’t afford not

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to see that. Nor can we afford to deny that the aliveness of the image is in no way related to the presumed meanings or messages underlying it, but is attributable to its mere physicality and ability to demonstrate rather than mean. The image shows before it means or symbolizes. According to what I have called “post-aesthetic” attitude—an attitude that signifies the cautious but informed return to the aesthetic as ethical aesthesis—the image as both, the artwork and a slice of real life has an inbuilt magic and vividness that strangely appeal to our sense of the historicality and palpability of things. At the same time, it appeals to our sense of the beautiful while making a tacit “promise of happiness” similar to the promise made to us by the forbidden (and unacknowledged) beauty of an image of horror and death. As Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon insist, the image might be understood “as a form of life, more specifically a form of damaged or endangered life—life threatened by death.” 43 Arguably, all images (including real or realistic ones) are artistic and aesthetic insofar as our appreciation of them requires the activation of our noncognitive faculties as well as our artistic-like ability to imaginatively relate to the reality depicted by them. From this standpoint, an image of terror(ism) where two airliners are attacking skyscrapers full of people, or the unforgettable image of the nuclear mushroom cloud dwarfing the city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prick our aesthetic and artistic instincts in unconventional ways by sharing unprecedented noncognitive experiences. Such “terrorist,” so to speak, images also exemplify Costello and Willsdon’s envisioning of them as forms of life threatened by death or instances of beauty preparing to be marred by ineffable ugliness. The ethical and historical value of such an image resides in attesting to the precise moment at which life is conjuring death, as if the image saw beauty as already infiltrated, inevitably, by ugliness and destruction and vice versa, the “ugly,” terrifying image as surreptitiously and immorally permeated by a touch of beauty—the latter being very relevant to the dominant idea of forbidden beauty in this project. Art, particularly the commemorative one—the one that bears witness to the cruelty and trauma of history—provides a legitimate social platform for reflection and meditation upon the human condition. Art, whether that be image or artwork, derives its legitimacy from its utterly aesthetic properties pertaining to the sphere of the pleasurable and the beautiful. Thus, (beautiful) art can very well tell a story of atrocity and terrorism. What is more, it can tell it in a beautiful (and ethical) way too. Noel Carroll has persuasively analyzed this morally ambivalent but ethically robust function of art: [A]rt, including memorial art, executes [a] social function exceedingly well. By simultaneously addressing, often, but not always, pleasurably, the perception, imagination, memory, emotions, and cognition with

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concrete images—that is, by engaging so many faculties of the whole person at once—it deeply embeds the ethos of the culture in appropriately prepared recipients. By mixing sense and sentiment, feeling and information, art renders the ethos of the culture accessible to its citizens and eminently retrievable for memory insofar as it has been encoded across multiple faculties. 44

Carroll posits that to secure historical memory and also inculcate an ethos of culture in the citizen, one needs art, which has the unique privilege of engaging many individual faculties at once. When it comes to artistic expression or appreciation, cognition seems woven into a grid of feelings, images, perceptions, and information, the combination of which alludes to and produces historical knowledge. A very interesting point that Carroll makes is that the process of historical knowledge production, when carried out by art, is frequently a “pleasurable” one, which enhances its aesthetic nature and purpose. I think that such a process is always pleasurable, even if the artistic (or aesthetic) object under consideration/appreciation bears negative connotations or, more radically, terrorizes by itself a specific audience—for instance, Kendell Geers’s work, discussed in chapter 2, artistically simulates terrorism, thus managing to really terrorize the people coming to see his installation by turning a simple reenactment into the real thing. To simplify the matter, doesn’t the spectator feel unconsciously attracted to real or fictional images of monstrosity at the same time that she is explicitly and unwaveringly horrified by them? There is something magical in the image of a mushroom cloud—perhaps its beautifully “apocalyptic” form—that makes us oblivious of its practically horrific consequences upon real people. Still, we appear to be just as enthralled by astonishing images of utter devastation and infinite misery (such as the images of a shattered Hiroshima) because they are exactly that: astonishing. In both cases, real pleasure is involved. On the one hand, to keep a moral face, we rage against the obvious tragedy and flagrant injustice against innocent noncombatants, and on the other, we indulge in an astonishing and quasi-magical (because unreal to us) spectacle, safely but secretly appraising the aesthetics, or even beauty, of nuclear reality. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL—AFTER ALL Beauty, in its “forbidden” sense, is important in three different ways: first, because it points to a morally unacceptable individual feeling; second, because, contrary to traditional belief, it reinforces our ethical criteria through heightening our aesthetic capacities, which subsequently enables us to feel the full extent of a potential disaster; third—and this is somehow related to the second idea—because it is a constant reminder of

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how through unconscious acts of aesthetic appreciation we might in fact turn into more politically and ethically involved beings. In Life Is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella, in Italian), a 1997 comic drama film by Roberto Benigni, the image of forbidden beauty makes its spectacular appearance as a seemingly disrespectful, or hubristic, comic mood working against the ghastly and ominous background of a Nazi concentration camp story. Benigni plays a Jewish Italian, named Guido, who has to use his imagination in order to emotionally protect his son, Joshua, during the horror of their internment at a concentration camp. His son must never find out where they really are, so Guido convinces him that the camp is part of a game with many participants, and whoever earns a thousand points wins a whole tank. Naturally, Joshua must follow his father’s instructions and carry out specific tasks if he wants to win the game. For the sake of the “game,” real German soldiers and guards are ingeniously presented as rivals who want the tank for themselves— which partly justifies their cruelty. Guido does his best to shield his son’s innocence from the gruesome reality. He achieves his goal of protecting Joshua but is himself captured and executed at the end. The film was a huge commercial success and was received by critics very positively. Nevertheless, there were many voices that spoke against the comedic element and structural “lightness” of the story, accusing Benigni of committing the very serious mistake of deliberately pushing in the background—thus deemphasizing—the unquestionable Nazi atrocity for the sake of narrating a story about love and the beauty of life. According to this kind of criticism, the film was offensive especially to actual survivors from concentration camps, for whom the entire internment experience was not a game at all, and to even imply that comedy may be introduced into the horrific reality of dying in gas chambers is to allegedly do horrible injustice to the real victims of the Holocaust. The question, therefore, was the following: How can humor, comedy, and the extermination of Jews figure in the same sentence? Isn’t that a terribly immoral posture? On the one hand, and to give such critics their due, it seems paradoxical to want to treat people’s misery with comedy and sarcasm. In addition, it seems wrong to talk about life’s beauty—which is basically the title of the film—from within an environment of ugliness and death. According to the law of conventional morality, and from the Kantian perspective of determinant judgment, it is unethical to refer to beauty and the Holocaust in the same breath. On the other hand, it is precisely at a moment of terror and atrocity that one should take to an aesthetic appraisal, as I argue in this project. To start with, we cannot possibly overlook that a movie is by definition a fictitious product which can neither bear witness to nor for that reason misrepresent or distort a historical reality. Keeping this in mind, one should have the freedom to appreciate, wonder at, or take pleasure in how the director’s project is (or

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is not) well-executed and in what ways the film fullfils its purpose of showing the beauty of innocence and love in the face of death and dehumanization. The film, aesthetically speaking, is beautiful in itself despite possible charges regarding its “immoral” historical context. Therefore, if we use our aesthetic judgment, which calls for a subjective kind of critique that is independent of moral precepts and laws pre-empting our judgment, we may draw the conclusion that Life Is Beautiful is not an offensive but an authentic piece of work which declares the human right to continue to live, in spite of the interference of evil and death. To get the point of Benigni’s film, it is absolutely necessary that we appreciate the aesthetic performance mounted in it. In fact, the main point of the film appears to be precisely the smile on the audience’s faces as they are exiting the theater as well as their renewed faith in kindness, generosity, and the feeling of the beautiful—human characteristics exhibited even while a major ethical catastrophe is unfolding on the screen. Beauty, here, is inextricably bound up with a wider sense of ethical Justice (as the unwritten Law), if we are to accept Elaine Scarry’s idea that beauty, as an overwhelming sensation, hinges upon the realization of the very aliveness of things and people. Supposing that beauty connotes life and ugliness denotes death, we may argue that Benigni manages to extract whatever is beautiful—frivolity, humor, comedy, humanity, a father’s love for his son—from a (non)life of ordeal and adversity and present it to us as if it were the only reality worth attending to. However, beauty can be seen as such only against the backdrop of ugliness and death. In other words, beauty can only be appreciated, indulged in, as well as reflected upon, on condition that it be juxtaposed to its exact opposite: deadness and ugliness—the excruciating reality of living in a Nazi concentration camp. Beauty emerges as a profoundly ethical notion and feeling, insofar as it demonstrates how deadly and intolerable life gets as soon as it is deprived of it. In order to view violence and terror through the right lens one has to peer into the question of the beautiful as liveliness and aliveness, an invaluable psychological state especially during times of misery and dehumanization. In his essay called “On Transience,” Freud supports the idea that beauty becomes more appealing to us once we realize its evanescence. Particularly in times of war, beauty is more highly appreciated as it is juxtaposed to (or compared with) the interminable horror of death and destruction: “Limitation in the possibility of enjoyment raises the value of enjoyment. . . . The beauty of the human form and face vanishes for ever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them fresh charm.” 45 Freud is here reminding us that life is great not despite death or in the face of it, but rather because of death and its eventual coming. If life is short rather than eternal, it seems even more lively and therefore desirable and beautiful since there is always the danger that it might slip

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away. Adapting Freud’s words to our discussion of fictional representations of the Holocaust may lead us to discover that the insidiousness of beauty in Benigni’s film, in the form of the comic element as well as the game-like attitude of the protagonist, is even more forcefully accentuated by the all-encompassing presence of death in the concentration camp. In Life Is Beautiful, beauty looms in the horizon even more spectacularly and meaningfully. What is more, it is constituted as an enlivening beauty precisely by the persisting influence of its opposite. This certainly looks like a non-licensed—indeed a forbidden—version of beauty, in the sense that it is not affected, regulated, or even informed by the general context of the story, which is one of morbidity and horror, but, rather, enhanced by it. The film is just one example of how the feeling of the beautiful might actually turn out to be a radically ethical sensation, given that it motivates us to work more seriously against all those forces—evil, injustice—opposing it. Viewed in this way, beauty may not be so “forbidden” after all. In the next chapter I explore the aesthetics of the September 11 terrorist strikes in New York from the perspective of the forbidden image of terror as an image of a simultaneously ethical and aesthetic value. NOTES 1. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, “The New Aestheticism: An Introduction,” in The New Aestheticism, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 11. 2. Critique of Judgement, sect. 5, 42. 3. Ibid., sect. 59, 182. 4. “Beyond Disinterestedness,” British Journal of Aesthetics 34, no. 3 (July 1994): 249–50. Before Kant imbued his aesthetic theories with the idea of disinterestedness, it was Shaftesbury who had introduced it not at the level of aesthetic but of moral experience. In the “Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody” (1738), Shaftesbury puts forth the idea that witnessing a beautiful valley as a “beautiful” business opportunity—in terms of its real estate value—deprives one of the ability to see it for its own sake, that is, for what it really is, and therefore experience its inherent beauty in an objective fashion. It was David Hume, however, that Kant drew upon in order to establish the connection between disinterestedness and taste in his discussion of beauty and aesthetics. In “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), Hume describes the condition and mentality of the observer as she is making a judgment of taste, reaching the conclusion that a judgment that is skewed, biased, or idiosyncratic is inferior to one that is not grounded upon prejudice and misconception. Both Kant and Hume acknowledge that taste (in itself as well as in the experience of the beautiful) is subjective, yet strangely objective in the sense that some tastes may be better than others. See, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1738] (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 222; David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” [1757], Essays Moral and Political (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894), 144. 5. Critique of Judgement, sect. 39, 122. 6. Critique of Judgement, sect. 39, 122. 7. Unlike Burke, Kant broadens the scope of delight to include notions and sentiments that far exceed that of relief.

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8. Critique of Judgement, “Introduction,” sect. 4, 15. This excerpt is taken from Kant’s revised—and somewhat simplified—introduction. As his original and more dense introduction reads, the power of judgment can be regarded either as a “mere faculty for reflecting on a given representation” or as a faculty for “determining an underlying concept by means of an empirical representation.” In the first case we are grappling with the reflective, while in the second case with the determining power of judgment. See, “First Introduction” to Critique of Judgement, sect. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 325. For a comparison between the first introduction and the revised one, check out Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste [1979] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35, wherein the author contends that the first introduction is more illuminating than the second insofar as it yields slightly different meanings to the concepts “aesthetic” judgment and “reflective” judgment. 9. Critique of Judgement, sect. 6, 42. 10. Ibid., sect. 40, 123. 11. Almost a hundred years after Kant, Nietzsche would mock those who desperately want to agree with others, or need others to agree with their own view in the general spirit of sensus communis. The great nineteenth-century philosopher thought that that desire was a sign of bad taste. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. and ed. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40. 12. Ryan Johnson, “Kantian Excentricities,” Evental Aesthetics 3, no. 3 (2015): 65. At this point, one might have to ask, are images meaningful by themselves? If they are not, how do we know what it is exactly that we feel (or what we are supposed to feel) when we encounter a terrible image of catastrophe? Doesn’t image need a narrative—a political, nationalistic, ideological one—to underpin as well as explicate it? And if image depends on narrative and words, isn’t it something that can be easily manipulated? In essence the question may be rephrased thus: If an image of terror is misleading, aren’t the spontaneous emotions that it elicits out of place, and isn’t the memory space that it creates a falsification of history as well as a manipulation of authentic human emotion? 13. Critique of Judgement, sect. 40, 124. 14. Joseph Margolis, Moral Philosophy after 9/11 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), 40–41. To avoid a probable misunderstanding, I need to underscore that Margolis thinks that the “openness” of the question of how one should or should not act is also part of the problematic nature of Kant’s philosophy and not necessarily an asset. 15. May Thorseth, “Reflective Judgment and Enlarged Thinking Online,” Ethics and Information Technology 10 (2008): 228. 16. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?,’” Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61–93. Ironically, to think for oneself, according to Kant’s own thought, one has to be in the company of others. 17. Krista Kauffmann, “‘One Cannot Look at This’/‘I Saw It’: Pat Barker’s Double Vision and the Ethics of Visuality,” Studies in the Novel 44, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 94. In this article, Kauffmann asks a very crucial question: “When is looking at the suffering of others an ethical imperative, and when is it merely voyeuristic?” (80). I believe that looking at images of suffering, even at the risk of turning scopophilic or voyeuristic, is of great ethical value insofar as it sustains the memory of pain at the level of the emotional, the emotive, and the empathic. 18. Theodore A. Gracyk, “Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (1986): 55. Gracyk’s insight is commensurate with the point that I am making later in the book, namely that Kant seems, at times, to treat the sublime as if it were the beautiful, or at least address the former through the discourse of the latter. 19. For a discussion of whether Kant prefers to treat human experience from the perspective of positivity and the pleasurable, see David Shier, “Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly,” British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 412–18. Therein, Shier makes the pro-

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vocative point that in Kant there can be no negative judgments of taste. Check out also Christian Wenzel, “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (1999): 416–22; Sean McConnell, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 2 (2008): 205–28; Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, ed. P. Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–62. 20. I use here the term “political” to signify the free thinking subject that uses her “common sense” to respond to matters of urgency. Such a subject would serve as a model for the consolidation of a responsible and ethical stance toward matters of political urgency—that is, problems related to governing the city. 21. Arendt is usually credited with discovering (or at least attempting to discover) common ground between Kant’s philosophical and moral axioms concerning the autonomy of the subject, on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea of the subject’s actual engagement with society, an idea which is implicit in the very concept of political judgment. Still, in her essay “Truth and Politics,” she has pointed to the fundamental contradiction that allegedly exists between a political treatment and a truthful or sincere attitude. See “Truth and Politics,” The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, 49–88. 22. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978), 257–67. These excerpts are in fact taken from Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and reproduced in The Life of the Mind. 23. Ibid., 271. 24. However, that universal will not become a concept or moral rule. 25. Needless to say, Arendt was scolded for insinuating that Eichmann did not have a natural hatred for Jews but simply followed orders without sifting them through personal judgment. 26. Joanna Hodge writes of Arendt’s books in an illuminating way: They move analysis away from assuming a collective framework for analysis, or smuggling in such an assumption, to instead proposing a radical rethinking of the various dimensions and dynamics of the human condition, amongst others, the inability to measure up to the enormity of the historical events in question. . . . [In] Eichmann in Jerusalem ([1963] 1994) . . . [Arendt] attempt[ed] to reveal the ordinariness of everyday motifs in the arrival of horrifying configurations in human history [and therefore] appeared to make light of the devastating consequences of Eichmann’s disengagement from the routine work of persecution. See “Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Kant and Derrida,” Women: A Cultural Review 22, no. 2–3 (2011): 208. 27. “In an aesthetic judgment, the mental faculties are left ajar, freed up and therefore open to new possible forms of cognition; it is in this state of free play that the subject harmonizes with the indeterminate object” (Ryan Johnson, “Kantian Excentricities,” 68). The fact that what is at issue is not just “play” but “free play” enhances the indeterminacy between the subject’s imagination and the “new possible forms of cognition.” 28. “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, trans. David Colclasure, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 103. [8: 380]. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 300. 30. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 36. 31. Martyn Lee, “The Sublime and Contemporary Popular Culture: The Radical Text in a Post-Political Era,” Journal for Cultural Research 12, no. 3 (2008): 255. 32. Critique of Judgement, sect. 27, 88. 33. Ibid., sect. 28, 92–94. 34. Ibid., sect. 23, 75.

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35. In section 23 of the “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant contends that the beautiful and the sublime “agree on the point of pleasing on their own account”; “both kinds of judgments are singular; “their claims are directed merely to the feeling of pleasure and not to any knowledge of the object.” The difference might be that the one appeals to form whereas the other evokes something “even devoid of form.” Still, isn’t “form” in Kant a concept that is highly suspect? 36. Nonetheless, Burke, like Kant, does believe that there is a strange kind of delight in us when terror does not “press too close.” 37. Richard Kearney, “Terror, Philosophy and the Sublime: Some Philosophical Reflections on 11 September,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 29, no. 23 (2003): 41–43. 38. See Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 452. This work is mentioned also by Kearney, whose remarks on Arendt are valuable. 39. Scarry, On Beauty, 30. 40. “Analytic of the Sublime,” Critique of Judgement, 99. 41. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 84. We should clarify that, contrary to Kant, Burke generally treats the beautiful and the sublime as if they were poles apart from each other. Despite the promising radicality of his definition of beauty, he, at least on a conscious level, does not go beyond associating it [beauty] with smoothness and delicacy. 42. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8. 43. Costello and Willsdon, 16. 44. Noel Carroll, “Art and Recollection,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 39, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 6. 45. Philip Rieff, ed., Character and Culture, by Sigmund Freud (New York, 1963), 149–50.

TWO A Glimpse into the Forbidden Aesthetic Appreciation, Kant, and 9/11

A number of ambivalent statements were made by eminent artistic figures in the aftermath of 9/11. 1 Α year after the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, Damien Hirst, a contemporary artist from Britain, revealed that he considered the September 11 terrorist attacks as a “visually stunning artwork: The thing about 9/11,” he told BBC News: is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually. . . . Of course, it’s visually stunning and you’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would ever have thought possible. . . . So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing. 2

This statement looks outrageous at first sight, to say the least. To view this major terrifying incident as a visually stunning achievement is dangerously close to prioritizing its supposed aesthetic value as spectacle over its unquestionable social, political, and ethical dimensions. Hirst, however, is going beyond merely expressing his repugnance by emphasizing the visual potentials of such an event as a work of art. Not only that, he wishes we could congratulate the perpetrators on their ability to make possible an impossibility that, paradoxically, as I will explain later, is an indispensable condition for great art’s existence, thus commenting not only on the tele-visual representations of 9/11 but also on 9/11 itself as an artwork whose inherent wickedness is integral to its supposed aesthetic powerfulness or beauty. Is the artist then only interested in such an atrocity as a work of art, a beautiful product? If so, where does all the 29

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pain go? Could it be that Hirst’s statement, far from erasing pain, constitutes a different, other kind of ethical appreciation that blends artistic pleasure with the concern for real pain, and human suffering with the concern for aesthetic appreciation? In other words, is a symbiosis of aesthetics and ethics possible in the case at hand? A week after the attacks, at a press conference for a series of concerts featuring his music, the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen declared that the terrorist hit was “the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing.” Right after these words were blurted out, the composer’s concerts were cancelled, as the organizers were convinced that he was in favor of terrorism. It never occurred to them that, like Hirst earlier on, Stockhausen was bypassing the (discussion of the) unquestionably atrocious consequences of the event, showing that he is fascinated or mesmerized by its extremely violent, horrific characteristics, as well as its occurrence as something inconceivable and impossible even to reflect upon: “Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.” 3 The exploration of the impossible is, in the composer’s view, a defining principle of true art, thus when the impossible, “a jump out of security, the everyday,” becomes a reality, it constitutes apparently the greatest work of the entire cosmos. Again, is there any space left for the ethical element once aesthetic appreciation of unprecedented atrocity comes into the picture? The fervent reactions to Stockhausen’s ideas insinuate that artistic preoccupations with the humanely impossible as well as the morally inconceivable have so far been unjustifiably (but not unpredictably) overlooked as they belong to a future, dispassionate, analysis of 9/11. Such an analysis would allow for a morally free and thus more ethical explication, as it would permit the symbiotic operation of many different faculties—politics, aesthetics, artistic discourse, realism—without any of them ruling over any other. We can get a glimpse of aesthetic appreciation as exemplified in Hirst’s and Stockhausen’s thinking by resorting to the concept of aesthetic or reflective judgment as formulated by Immanuel Kant. As we have seen, in the introduction to the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant posits that there are two kinds of judgment, the determinant and the reflective (or aesthetic), and that they are poles apart from each other insofar as the former takes us from the universal to the particular whereas the latter takes us from the particular to the universal. 4 I want to focus on the antithesis between the aesthetic and the determinant in order to demonstrate how the former—the act of aesthetically appreciating—is paradoxi-

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cally seminal in doing justice to, comprehending as well as coping with manmade catastrophe. Moreover, I will show how an aesthetics of beauty (which usually goes unacknowledged) is at stake when it comes to the sheer act of witnessing spectacular images of large-scale catastrophes. Arguably, to recognize the aesthetic appeal of those images is an act of individual freedom: freedom to feel and express one’s own taste beyond moral rules, political interests, or logical precepts. Of course, Kant does not necessarily mean to associate the beautiful with the aesthetic attraction toward manmade violence and terrorism, but he does touch upon the aesthetic powerfulness of nature when the latter shows its might with catastrophic consequences, a case in which nature might be said to exhibit its “terrorist” face—a case of “physical terrorism,” so to speak. In addition, the subjective feeling of the beautiful and the disinterestedness connected with it might well be applied to instances from real life. For those reasons it is worth re-contextualizing Kant’s treatment of beauty and morality to fit such contemporary phenomena as global terrorism. DAMIEN HIRST AND THE TV IMAGE OF 9/11 Damien Hirst’s description of the terrorist attacks as visually stunning mostly bears on their representation or reproduction via television, although it does contain an undertone of admiration for the perpetrators because they allegedly committed an act that far exceeded the artistically and socially possible. Hirst seems to adopt the Kantian conception of aesthetic/reflective judgment in appreciating the representation of the 9/11 horrific deeds, as contrasted to those fiercely criticizing him who assess the event from the perspective of determinant judgment. The visually stunning artwork, as the artist argues, is something that those responsible need to be congratulated upon since they have presumably gone where no one has gone before in terms of artistic achievement. They have committed an act of transgressing the boundaries of the commonplace and the possible; therefore they have accomplished the true essence of beauty, as Kant defines it, namely as an autonomous entity that defies human measure and conceptual thinking. But why does Hirst say that it is “a very dangerous thing” to shy away from congratulating them? Why isn’t his statement dangerous, let alone flagrantly unjust or unethical toward the victims of 9/11? In his view, it would be dangerous and wrong to dwell too long on the immorality of aesthetically appreciating the entire event as something beautiful because to talk about morality surrounding an event would shift attention away from the event itself. From the point of view of art, to deal with morality and representation in a single breath would probably mean to judge on the basis of what happened before or after the event. In other words, it

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would mean to assess, for instance, the motives of the criminals and the consequences of their actions only, instead of focusing with disinterestedness also on the thing called 9/11 in itself as well as its visual representations, however hard and insensitive that may sound. Every time we look at the tele-visual representation of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hirst seems to say, we need to take a minute and appreciate aesthetically the unprecedented spectacle without worrying whether we are being immoral by doing it. If we cannot do that, then we are allegedly both morally unfree and prejudiced, and in the case of an artist, that would be suicide. Kant discusses the problem of moral freedom in relation to beauty and art. He holds that the beautiful is “an object of delight apart from any interest” since the delight is not grounded upon any personal inclination but is rather an expression of the individual’s freedom to make a certain kind of judgment that is independent of personal preferences. 5 Kant here connects beauty with objectivity, universality of taste and, more importantly, moral freedom, or rather freedom from morality (as moralism). For him morality constitutes a problematic notion when it comes to an individual’s appreciation of an object to the extent that it poses a question of interest or personal condition, that is, a question of a deep-seated prejudice that blurs the subject’s view leading her to concentrate not on the specific object of beauty but on all the things around that object. That, however, represents an unethical stance to the extent that it allows one to think of the object of beauty through the perspective of determinant judgment only, which imposes restrictions on individual taste, thus making human behavior radically unfree. To put it in practical terms, if Kant were to address the 9/11 terrorist acts, he would have regarded the commonly accepted idea that terrorism is evil and immoral as inevitably leading to the misconception that a visual representation of terrorism is evil and immoral, too. Hirst emphasizes the danger of dismissing art and aesthetic appreciation for the sake of morality and argues that it would be a shame to disregard the visual powerfulness of 9/11 just because it appears morally wrong to deal with the disaster in terms of anything else but the irreversible victimization of three thousand people. These people, however, represent only a horrifying consequence of the act and are absolutely irrelevant to the act itself as a phenomenon and a visually defying event. In section 2 of the Critique of Judgement Kant provides us with the following example: If any one asks me whether I consider that the palace I see before me is beautiful I may, perhaps, reply that I do not care for things of that sort that are merely made to be gaped at. . . . All one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking, no matter how indifferent I may be to the real existence of the object of this representation. It is quite plain that in order to say that the object is beautiful . . . everything turns on what I make of this representation. 6

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To reply that one is not in the least interested in impressive or beautiful things is a moral judgment and beside the point. In this case, if one is uninterested in beauty alone one is surely far from disinterested. A judgment about the purpose that, say, a beautiful building fullfils, instead of tackling the building’s pure form, reveals a frame of thinking that is partial and dependent upon subjective feelings or conceptual frameworks connected with certain interests. If you are prejudiced against luxury, how can you find a luxurious building beautiful, even if it really is? If you tend to look down on the presence and the very nature of an object, how can you really appreciate the representation of it? Following a similar pattern, to insist that the air crash into the WTC, as it was captured on television was by no means a mind-capturing or fascinating view because so many human lives were terribly lost is probably to miss the point of fascination as an ineffably disinterested act of appreciating beauty. Of course, it does matter a lot that there were thousands of victims and one could not think of a more brutal, infinitely inhumane, and immoral act of violence, but there still remains the question of (not) letting interest interfere with the autonomy of aesthetic powerfulness, in this case, the sheer visual event of the attack. Interest would definitely be extremely confusing (in a way, it would tamper with our aesthetic and cognitive faculties) in the sense that psychological, moral, emotional involvement, albeit perfectly natural, would affect our judgment and lead us to think that a terrorist act that led to the death of so many people can never be called visually compelling or fascinating, even if it really is. Kant draws our attention to the fact that there is a deep heterogeneity between visual compulsion, which is interest-free, and reason or morality. Whereas reason has to do with the common laws of understanding that are based on predetermined rules of the “should/should not” type, visual attraction, because it springs directly from human emotion and imagination, bears on more authentic rules grounded on an aesthetic/ reflective and independent judgment that judges what it sees at any given moment rather than stops to think rationally before judging. Kant describes the aesthetic idea as an “inexponible” representation of the imagination, and the rational idea as an “indemonstrable” concept of reason. 7 Elsewhere he says that the aesthetic idea is “the counterpart” of a rational idea, meaning that beauty does not pertain to the realm of reason; in a sense it is other than reason. 8 Thus, on the one hand, when we watch a disaster happen live before our very eyes or through endless re-runs on our television screens, reason dictates that we feel for the victims, even if we or our own are not directly involved in the tragedy, while raging against those who provoked it. It is the natural thing to do. On the other hand, we are unknowingly captivated by an ineffable and forbidden feeling of awe and secret pleasure that we’ve finally gotten the chance to witness something unprecedented: the terrifying but compelling dimen-

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sions of unnameable beauty. And that is neither natural nor reasonable. It signifies, rather, the emergence of a forbidden aesthetic deprived of logic or morality. Such a forbidden aesthetic is the key to thinking of the 9/11 disaster as visually captivating or stunning. A passenger plane literally crashing into a WTC skyscraper is something we have never witnessed before. Therefore we cannot associate it with an already established law of reasoning so as to be able to conceptualize it. Its aesthetic power derives from its autonomy, its non-dependence on any known category of perception. The WTC, argues Frank Lentricchia, has been transformed “into a narrative of spectacular images. Terrorism for the camera. This is our fascination.” 9 We are fascinated by the spectacular as an original personal experience, thereby leading ourselves, as spectators, automatically into the terrain of aesthetic appreciation, namely of what is new, previously unknown and, yes, for a single moment, beautiful. In an intriguing article, Ronald Bleiker points out that “the sensibility that aesthetic insight may generate, and that instrumental reason is unable to apprehend, also includes the unknown, the unseen, and the unthought. For Walter Benjamin, this is the very task of art: to generate a demand for which a sense of need has not yet arisen.” 10 Instrumental reason, that is, cannot comprehend the importance that individual taste or instinct places on the spectacular or the unknown, and that is why it excludes the aesthetic, as aesthesis or sensibility, from the entire problematic of, for instance, realist politics in relation to terrorism. Bleiker aims to show how closely interrelated reason and the commonplace really are, hence, the non-spectacular and the known, and how limited reason’s scope really is insofar as it attempts to conceive of both life and art through already established laws and common thought patterns. The problem, however, lies in the fact that true aesthetic experience, artistic originality, and the beauty of unprecedented spectacularity are autonomous because, by definition, they are not contingent upon the sphere of what Kant calls concept or the commonplace. If they were, they would not be original, spectacular, or an experience. Kant always thought the beautiful to be an object that is radically other than concept. 11 A characteristic example that encapsulates his theory of the beautiful as an object that we may see but may not touch is the one referring to art’s inability to explain itself: “no Homer or Wieland” can explain how all the good ideas are put together in the mind, for the obvious reason that he does not know with certainty and therefore cannot impart the knowledge to others. 12 The artist does have a vague idea about the thing that she says, but absolutely no clue how that thing came about. If she had some idea, it would mean that her work corresponded to certain needs of a given reality, which, in turn, would render the art predictable and its beauty unoriginal. Conversely, original art and authentic beauty are the products of an artist who does not aim consciously at satisfying a certain

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concept or pre-given rule, and who definitely is in no position to explicate her artwork beforehand but might be able to reflect upon it after the fact. For Kant, the authentic is a work of genius. As he argues, genius is “a talent” for producing an artwork that is premised upon no specific rule. In fact, that artwork should have the ability to create entirely new rules and consequently “originality” must be the primary quality of genius. 13 In other words, the work of genius does not abide by any common or known rule but rather establishes its own laws that can be discerned only in retrospect. In this light, the authentic, as the primary quality of genius, points away from concept or reason insofar as it represents imagination’s resistance to reason’s tendency to contain or conceptualize. In the same way that the artist can create the authentic only by giving up on the conscious claim to authenticity, one can view the authentic (or judge something to be authentic) only after the fact, a posteriori, that is, by giving up on the conscious search for authenticity and by employing what Kant calls aesthetic/reflective judgment that requires that one appreciate the authentic without being prepared for it, thereby adopting a more disinterested stance towards it. We have to return to aesthesis and the aesthetic in order to momentarily capture authenticity encompassing either a work of art or human experience. Whereas aesthetic judgment would look to the unknown for authenticity, determinant judgment, which pre-determines the boundaries of art without, however, the latter needing to set any boundaries for itself, would merely be able to fulfil already existing artistic or aesthetic needs, in other words, it would satisfy the known, hence the commonplace. However, if we are to subscribe to Benjamin’s view that art’s mission is to create demands where there are no needs, we have to accept that (beautiful) art is in excess of established reality, simultaneously generating, in a way, an excess of reality. To put it in plain terms, both true art and authentic aesthetic experience posit issues that will only be dealt with or appreciated in the future. In this light, what comments like Damian Hirst’s contribute today is a platform for tomorrow’s artistic as well as political needs. Beauty, according to Kant, situates itself in the realm of non-conceptual imagination. The Kantian conception of real beauty capitalizes on the immediate as well as peculiar or uncanny pleasure produced by an object or aesthetic experience. The pleasure deriving from an aesthetic appreciation of beauty is characterized as immediate because it is unmediated by any concepts, moral interests, or rational ends. In addition, such a pleasure is seen as uncanny as it is extraneous to any cognitive or epistemological function of the mind. An object is called beautiful insofar as its representation generates a peculiar and immediate pleasure in the subject. 14 It is this peculiar or uncanny pleasure that interests me with regard to appreciating either art or real-life experience. More particularly, since reason and morality do not allow for an engagement with life or art that

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is based mostly upon sensibility, there seems to emerge an alternative aesthetic, that is, an aesthetic that centers precisely upon the morally forbidden—thus, socially or politically unacceptable—feeling of pleasure generated when a subject appreciates aesthetically, or reflects upon the very form of, a certain object or view that by “normal” standards cannot be thought of as moral or lawful. It is this forbidden aesthetic that allows for the operation of peculiarity and immediacy, the two seminal elements that underlie beauty as radically other. It is probably the same—forbidden—aesthetic that had, for instance, attracted hundreds of curious people to a lynching scene back in 1915 America. A witness observes how “hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene. . . . People came in automobiles and carriages from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of the rope.” 15 The public display of African American lynching and hanging contributed to its spectacularity as an event that was, for the majority of the people who gathered, unprecedented and therefore peculiar. The racist backdrop definitely provided what was thought, at the time, to be a moral justification for the execution of the supposedly inferior—”he was not only a criminal but a negro as well!”—and in this sense, the people (especially those that endorsed racism) came prepared to watch a dispensation of justice that was, from their point of view, politically and socially correct, thereby, in a way, aesthetically acceptable. On the other hand, there is a big difference between hearing of hanging as punishment and actually viewing such a punishment. However supportive or non-supportive of inhumanely radical acts of punishment, the spectators of the scene at hand took shots of the peculiar and strangely enticing “happening” precisely because they were probably attesting to such a cruel method of killing for the first time. In fact, it is highly likely that they were watching any kind of killing, cruel or not, for the first time, and that added to the mystification of the ritual of public execution in broad daylight. At the same time, the clicking of the cameras created an aesthetic distance between the viewers and their object of interest: They were distant enough—therefore safe—from the tortured subject, but also close enough to aesthetically respond to the torture. They felt relieved by their non-participation in the gory event—they were not being tortured—hence, also happy to be able to get a glimpse of something they could hardly watch again in the future. All these circumstances turned this spectacle into something beautiful, albeit ethically monstrous, to watch. Of course, to a postmodern viewer/ reader the aesthetic of the lynching scene belongs to the realm of the “forbidden” for the additional reason that it refers to a displaced, almost unwritten or erased, history and memory of torture in America. Nonetheless, laying bare the forbidden (because displaced) aesthetic of such scenes or events will certainly lead to a consensual interpretation and appraisal of pure violence based upon an ethically involved frame of

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thinking. In other words, we have to face past atrocity head on to be able to recognize different versions of atrocity in the future. Aesthetic appreciation in its forbidden sense and art become imperative when it comes to addressing terrorism. Looking at terror through the lens of aesthesis by no means undermines the seriousness of a critical political situation. Far from it—it yields alternative or additional insights into a terrorist incident that reason alone cannot account for and helps retain an ethical stance toward terrorism. Those insights have to do with the power of imagination, sensibility, and “a range of other, more sensuous and perhaps more tangible yet equally important forms of insights, from the poetic to the purely visual.” 16 For example, the filmic reproduction of the September 11 attacks, if looked at with a disinterested and not morally involved eye, may be imprinted on the mind in such a way that it allows us to contemplate the event by using alternately imagination and reason, sensibility and logic, fantasy and memory, without privileging specifically one single faculty. Moreover, in order to continue to do justice to the horrific dimensions of this event, it does not suffice to simply use written or spoken language to convey what happened on that day. 17 To lay bare the political and social consequences, continuous exposure to, and aesthetic appreciation of its visual representations are necessary not only because the category of the visual is more intense, being much more of a palpable experience, but also because it will help preserve the memory throughout the ages and generations to come, thereby keeping options open as to how such an event should be treated. THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF DISASTER ART An ethical treatment of the terrorist incident was what the American photographer Joel Meyerowitz had in mind when he requested, and was finally granted, unlimited access to Ground Zero in order to visually capture the horror associated with the scene of trauma. Twenty-seven of those photographs were singled out for an international exhibition called “After September 11: Images from Ground Zero.” The exhibition’s intention was to communicate to the world the immense dimensions of the tragedy, but more importantly, to appeal to the human psyche and emotion through the use of non-linguistic and non-rational means. Even though Meyerowitz’s aim allegedly was just to preserve the memory of horror by bearing witness to the debris and the morbid reality of the site, he seems to have done much more than that. He takes to an aesthetic appreciation of what he has witnessed and photographed. In an interview he makes the following ambivalent statement: “It’s not perverse, I think, to focus not on the horror but to marvel at what’s here. Look at how that building stood up! Is this not astonishingly beautiful? . . . You

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Figure 2.1. There is just "One World Trade Center" now. Photo: Joe Mabel, licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

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make judgments that are, dare I say, aesthetic ones. I’ m walking a fine line between art and documentary” (my emphasis). 18 Admittedly, to place the word “beautiful” in the same context as the words “horror” and (absolutely real) “atrocity” is not merely to walk “a fine line between art and documentary” but also to cross the line of sensitivity to human misery. Indeed, to express fascination with an aesthetically appealing view which, however, resulted from an excruciating experience such as the terrorist event at hand constitutes an immoral act. Paradoxically, it is Meyerowitz himself who concedes to the insensitive thrust of an aesthetic response: I don’t like making aesthetic response to other people’s tragedies. I see a lot of my contemporaries do that and it always offends me. . . . They start to make nice frames of people who are in trouble or people who have been blown to bits. . . . I’m trying to make photographs that are in some ways highly descriptive images of what I see, rather than make tricky interesting art, photographic solutions to visual problems, trying to stay raw and give you the scene and disappear from the making. 19

In this excerpt, Meyerowitz shrewdly makes a distinction between himself and all the “others.” As he claims, he is simply describing journalistically what he sees in juxtaposition with those who have the tendency to create artistic and highly colourful images out of real ugliness and horror. In other words, he insists, his own work should be seen as realistic and objective, whereas the others’ as skewed and subjective insofar as it does not yield an accurate representation of the gory event. It is beyond doubt that Meyerowitz finds himself on the safe side when he calls for a moral treatment of 9/11. To claim that he does not like “making aesthetic response to other people’s tragedies” is to state the obvious: Aestheticizing people’s misery is immoral. Still, is his claim ethical as well as moral? For one thing, the photographer’s statements in the second excerpt sound rather disingenuous compared to what he has already stated in the first excerpt. On the one hand, he exalts the peculiar beauty of the debris, and on the other he denounces an aesthetic confrontation with horror. When it comes to a serious engagement with terrorism, denouncing aesthetics is a moral but not necessarily ethical act. According to the law of morality, as we have already seen, it’s only fair to decry the cruelty of the terrorist attack and subsequently abstain both from discussing the event and reproducing its images once and for all. Ethics, though, picks up where conventional morality (the morality of human law) leaves off. An ethical stance is sincere enough to open up the issue of the importance of aesthetics in discussing the real. More particularly, it reveals to us that in order to preserve the memory of atrocity, thereby keeping atrocity from repeating itself, we have to retrieve emotion and sensibility, which, in turn, will lead us to place more emphasis on the non-rationality of terror. Without activating sensibility we are inevitably resorting to logic

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and reason, in which case we end up rationalizing an event, thereby undermining its significance in the long run. In this light, contrary to what Meyerowitz argues, to present a “tricky” and “interesting” art of the real seems ethical as it exploits positively the work of the senses in order to produce a truthful and accurate picture of the horrific reality. Despite the fact that Meyerowitz seems fully committed to a moral construal of the disaster, one cannot overlook the aesthetic connotations of his thinking as revealed earlier in the text where, for example, he exults over the beauty of the building that is still standing despite the chaos surrounding it: “Is this not astonishingly beautiful!” Of course, the photographer here does not mean to be disrespectful toward the victims of the disaster. Still, he finds it too hard not to acknowledge the uncanny beauty of such a spectacular scene. In essence, it is not he that acknowledges the scene; it’s rather the beauty that immediately acknowledges itself in his narrative as a forceful peculiarity that creeps surreptitiously into the natural flow of moral thought. It could be said that Meyerowitz is unconsciously affected by the Kantian perspective of beauty as that radicality which generates an immediate and peculiar pleasure that is grounded upon no epistemological or moral reason whatsoever but, rather, upon the power of imagination. However, it is safe to say that his pictures, by aesthetically framing the horrifying reality and thereby keeping the wounds open for everyone to look at, contribute to an ethical treatment of the event through an empowerment of sensibility toward radical photographic beauty as well as through an aesthetic judgment of terror and reality. As another critic very pointedly argued, “in the end, it might be beauty that a Ground Zero memorial most seriously needed,” quickly adding that by “beauty” he means “an aesthetic experience that emotionally moves a beholder, an effective response that takes us beyond ourselves into new (and often unexpected) positions of being and feeling.” 20 The aesthetic experience of the beautiful renders the beholder a stranger to herself by means of unleashing unknown emotional forces from within her and providing unfamiliar sensibilities that essentially “de-center” her while utterly changing the way she thinks, feels or, simply, exists. Aesthetic judgment, as Kant views it, is much more related to politics and ethics than we think. “Art’s vivid symbolization of autonomy, despite its unrestrained incomprehensibility, represents the single most powerful motivation for Kant’s writing of the third Critique,” writes Tobin Siebers, adding that “Kant’s insistence . . . that the beautiful object possesses a perceptible form requires that it exist on a scale approachable by human beings, and this means that his view of otherness has inherent political value.” 21 In other terms, the object of beauty is not as inaccessible and transcendental as we may think. Its otherness is perceptible, thus accessible, insofar as it possesses a certain form that can be evaluated, both aesthetically and politically, by the subject.

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Not only does the beautiful object have a perceptible form that shows its compatibility with the human and the political, but also its inherent autonomy is a symbol of moral freedom, individual autonomy, and humanity’s urge to extricate itself from prejudice and traditional morality. As we have already seen, both aesthetic appreciation of beauty and reflective judgment emphasize the role of disinterestedness in assessing an object. In effect, not only pure and humane but also negative (“ugly”) or inhumane works of art may be seen as aesthetically beautiful because art is not obliged to always entertain us in the traditional way or turn us into happy viewers. Similarly, not only humane and benign but also inhumane and malignant non-art representations could be considered aesthetically attractive because stark reality will never attempt to flatter our vanity. Arnold Berleant has posited that experiences of the aesthetic “include not only the elevated and noble but the reprehensible, degrading, and destructive” as well. 22 True, it is not the fault of the aesthetic domain that there exists degradation and destruction in the world we live in. In fact, it befalls the aesthetic to address the very destructive element in our world. Berleant raises the question of the importance of a negative aesthetic experience of destruction through an empowerment of the senses, but what is at stake here is also the disinterested—therefore morally forbidden—reflection on destruction as a (positive?) kind of appreciating beauty. In such a framework, art or artistic experience is employed as a pretext for legitimating an aesthetic appreciation of real terror. Damian Hirst’s acceptance of art’s detachment from the morality-immorality binary leads him to state that all the inhumanity and violence encompassing the site of the WTC plane crash, the so-called “Ground Zero,” by no means rule out the possibility of the emergence of art. On the contrary, in this specific case they foreshadow the advent of original art in the form of the horrid and the immoral: It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. Meyerowitz, as we saw earlier, never claims to make art, only to bear witness to the reign of terror brought upon the city of New York in a single morning. He persistently wards off the temptation to succumb to an aesthetic appreciation of the ghastly reality, but, in the end, he cannot shrink from expressing a secret admiration for the peculiarly spectacular view before him. Still, art, on a conscious level, remains out of the equation, even if it sneaks, on a deeper level, upon his photographic vision as a peculiar potentiality that could be the source of so-called “original” art. But while Meyerowitz dismisses any thought of connecting such an unprecedented aesthetic experience with art, Hirst guiltlessly espouses the idea that the 9/11 wickedness and ugliness might just as well be integral to the project of original art, since the latter does not necessarily comply either with rules of morality or with already established laws of reasoning concerning ideas of purity and goodness. Original art, to him, inevita-

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bly transgresses not just the ordinary norms for art but also the law dictating that art should be fictitious by definition—9/11, being (unfortunately) absolutely real, would fit this model! Following that pattern, we may assume that true originality lies in art’s ability to communicate as well as produce reality. In a similar fashion, an original aesthetic experience, which is not necessarily associated with any kind of art whatsoever, generates ever new versions of the strangely appealing and fascinating, namely the beautiful, to the extent that it involves the element of surprise which activates our imagination. According to Edmund Burke, such experiences “captivate the soul” before even rationality and logic have the opportunity to make a decision as to whether they should join forces with them or simply resist them. 23 The original aesthetic experience that millions of people had by watching live the terrorist attack verged on a feeling that was unprecedented and morally forbidden. Before the astounded spectators could comprehend rationally what was going on, their imagination was for a moment free to wander around uninhibited in mental places that they had hardly visualised or sensed in the past. They were witnessing the a-moral face of uncensored beauty through an unconscious espousal of an aesthetic, rather than determinant, judgment of the scene. In Kant’s view, the aesthetic is at work when the imagination is unrestrained by any predetermined rule so that free play between imagination and understanding occurs and a feeling of pleasure arises as a result. Still, wouldn’t such a free play that generates pleasure operate also with an “ugly” (negative) artwork or aesthetic experience? Where unrestrained imagination is involved, there is a fascinating contiguity between ugliness and beauty. But is there any practical advantage in the “beautiful” representation of ugliness? Artistic representation and the subsequent aesthetic appreciation of historical inhumanity potentially promote the political and consolidate an ethically responsible attitude toward history and the nations. Eugene Delacroix’s magnificent 1824 painting The Massacre at Chios depicts how twenty thousand Greeks were butchered by the Turkish army on the island of Chios in two days. The massacre had taken place only two years before, so it was a very recent incident. Delacroix’s use of vivid colors, fervent passion, and strong emotion managed to convey accurately the terror on people’s faces as well as the ruthlessness of the enemy, thus helping shift the attention of the European powers to the Greek cause. We might say that the painting, which was bought by the French government for six thousand francs, constituted an immediate political statement by spreading the word of the Greek revolution, aside from the fact that it handed down to the next generations the knowledge and awareness of a gory event. Of course, The Massacre at Chios is a work of art while the World Trade Center terrorist attacks footage is not. Still, in both cases real people and real horror are involved. In both instances

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there are spectators called upon to appreciate the representation of an atrocious event by judging critically the autonomous form of the event, therefore resorting to aesthetics and visual powerfulness for making a political inference. 24 I need to emphasize here that I have no intention whatsoever of equating the very real atrocity of the terrorist disaster with the artistic representation of a terrorizing incident from the distant past. After all, there was no literal violence involved in the making of the painting, as contrasted to the 9/11 footage which was a direct reporting rather than an artistic representation of an unspeakable atrocity. On the other hand, The Massacre at Chios is quite possibly a direct reporting of atrocity, too. It would be wrong to overlook the potential truthfulness and/or historical accuracy of Delacroix’s work if we are to take into consideration that, in Delacroix’s time, there was no photography or camera that would provide a perfect reproduction of an event. Painting did play the role of a camera; or better, painting constituted a primitive kind of photography. The artistic representation of the Chios incident is much closer to reality than we think. To both, appraise Delacroix’s quasi-photographic illustration and adopt the ethically right and moral-free attitude towards images of 9/11 one needs to simultaneously activate one’s sensual and intellectual capabilities in order to grasp the political as well as ethical dimensions of the beautiful and aesthetically powerful, because the object of beauty “is both a source of intimate, personal feelings and of an idea of reason present in every human being.” 25 Terrorism cannot and should not be seen as a work of art. It is true that many times we consider a non-art object as if it were artistic in order to discuss its aesthetic value or dimensions. However, something could be visually stunning or aesthetically powerful without being considered a work of art. The important thing is to retrieve the aesthetic quality or aspect of a serious event in order to reveal or, even better, to sense its moral consequences and its ethical and social impact on human psychology and political practice. The September 11 attack, without being itself art, should be seen primarily as an aesthetic experience that we have to dwell on so that we will never risk rationalizing atrocity. But how can we dwell on that experience long enough to avoid putting it in a logical frame? The answer is via reflecting persistently on the terrorizing images themselves. Image, as Heidegger has it, is pre-conceptual, revealing much more than concept does. 26 Whereas concept employs rational language and conventional methodologies to describe from a distance an event or phenomenon, fictional or not, image derives from the power of imagination to evoke dream-like visual events that precede conscious language. As Walter A. Davis beautifully puts it, image “is the native language of anxiety, the language psyche uses in an effort to mediate the emotional and psychological impact of events. As such, a language of images has much in common with the logic of the

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dream, a logic of hidden and unexpected connections.” 27 The unexpected image of the WTC plane crash is fully aligned with the dream-work and the pre-conceptual associations contrived by imagination as an entity which is forbidden in the world of concept and rationality. It is the preconceptual nature of imagination that renders it “forbidden,” in the sense that an image that is devoid of concept is too difficult to manipulate and thus has to be repressed as it functions like a terrorist in the realm of concept. If image or imagination feels, at times, terrorist, could we also argue that (impressive) terrorism is just as imaginative and creative? In a highly sophisticated and globalized world there are hardly any security risks or loopholes. Or, at least, governments and societies seem to be doing their best to intensify safety procedures and measures so as to minimize any security breaches, especially in the post-9/11 world. This entails that for an act of terrorism to be seen as “successful” it has the obligation to be creative and imaginative; otherwise it is bound to fail. Indeed, it needs to be able to take terror one step further, so to speak, either through escalating its violence—by means of the so-called “contagion effect,” or “outbidding” 28—or through inventing new techniques of terror. The reason is that terrorism needs to contain the element of surprise to be effective, which translates as imprinting itself on people’s minds as dramatically and traumatically as possible. Did the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center contain the element of surprise? (I am focusing on the WTC attacks, rather than the assault on the Pentagon, because only those were covered live, which means that their importance draws a lot upon image, the infamous pictures of aircraft crashing into skyscrapers.) Doubtless, it did contain the element of surprise insofar as it was unexpected, it took place on a massive scale, and it utilized familiar means in an unfamiliar way, turning the entire spectacle into a visually powerful experience: this is “a moment when words are overwhelmed by pictures, when critical discourse and reasoned inquiry is drowned in a flood of rhetorical figures and stark oppositions. . . .” 29 Now, it is not a coincidence that visual powerfulness and unexpected techniques are what we usually talk about when discussing great literature or art. There is, indeed, an irrevocable affinity between shocking terrorism and shocking (or shockingly beautiful) art; an affinity that is much more than symbolic or analogical. STOCKHAUSEN’S ROMANTIC VISION: AUTHENTICITY AND TERRORISM Is then terrorism so close to imagination and the artistic mind? Terrorism is not art, “though the parallels between them are close enough to be disturbing,” given that “after certain acts of terrorism, we are often told,

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the world will never be the same again. An impact of such magnitude is analogous to the lasting effect of great art,” argues Simon Caterson. 30 And if Hirst is justified, though not unconditionally, for his idea that the images from the 9/11 terrorist attack footage, but not the event itself, resemble works of art, Stockhausen, who was nearly lynched for declaring his admiration for the terrorists themselves as artists and the 9/11 atrocity as “the greatest work of art ever,” moves from the representation of the event to the event itself as some, perhaps morbid, kind of art. In Stockhausen’s astonishing view, the main reason why 9/11 is a crime is that “the people were not agreed. They didn’t go to the ‘concert.’” 31 The underlying assumption here is that the terrorist attack is, still, a concert, a work of art, regardless of whether the victims were agreed or not. What for Stockhausen gives the event its artistic flavor, though, is supposedly the fact that the jump out of security and the everyday, which, according to the composer, happens sometimes poco a poco in art, took place in a single instant in the case at hand, thus turning 9/11 into a grand scale impromptu symphony, the most magnificent art of the whole cosmos. So many years later it remains extremely hard to conceive, let alone accept, Stockhausen’s opinion. However, it would be very useful to see why and how he has come to believe 9/11 to be an artistic phenomenon, which would subsequently lead us to unearth ethical or unethical traces in artistic thought and eventually draw our own conclusions as to the contiguity of terror and art and, more importantly, of terrorism and aesthetic experience. Like Hirst, Stockhausen advocates the disengagement of art from conventional morality and the a priori laws of reason that hinder an unprejudiced view of autonomous beauty. Instead, he celebrates the potentialities of an aesthetic/reflective judgment that respects the visually powerful object (the object of beauty) for what it is, namely, an incomprehensible otherness independent of pre-given concepts, rather than pre-empts visual power (or the object-hood of beauty) on the basis of the morality-immorality or concept-imagination binary. In terms of his particular philosophical viewpoint, it is more than clear that Stockhausen subscribes to a mystical conception of art. If art is not related to some kind of revelation that involves life and death, an apocalyptic vision of creation that involves a reconfiguration of human consciousness, indeed, of reality itself, then it is worth nothing. Seen that way, true art treads on forbidden ground where it mingles with reality without being reality’s mirror image, that is, a sheer representation of reality any longer. The true target of art, Stockhausen would insist, is to authenticate itself by becoming real, tangible, abandoning the sphere of the false and the artificial forever. In this light, the apocalyptic and aesthetically powerful nature of the 9/11 strikes consists in the fact that the terrorists attained the unattainable, achieved something in one act by eccentrically opting for a hit that was unprecedented, original, spectacu-

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lar and inconceivable at the same time, since nobody thought that such a hit was feasible on American territory. However paradoxical it may sound, Stockhausen’s artistic vision is imbued with the romantic spirit and a pervasively anarchist aesthetic. It is romantic because it is aligned with the persistent romantic quest for authenticity and the innovative. It is anarchist because it transgresses the commonly acceptable model of order and harmony, also introducing the destructive presence of evil embodied in the figure of Lucifer. Creation’s counterpart is destruction, and art needs to bear witness to that; otherwise art functions as propaganda in favor of purity and morality. A few days after his initial statement about 9/11 being a great work of art, Stockhausen attempted to clarify his ideas by issuing another statement which introduced the figure of Satan: In my work, I have defined Lucifer as the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. He uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation. He does not know love. After further questions about the events of America, I said that such a plan appeared to be Lucifer’s greatest work of art. Of course, I used the designation “work of art” to mean the work of destruction personified in Lucifer. . . . I cannot find a fitting name for such a “satanic composition.” 32

In other words, the terrorist attacks were a work of art not for Stockhausen but for Lucifer who, being a basic character in the composer’s project over a period of twenty-five years, plays the role of a dark power speaking through him but definitely not on his behalf. Lucifer, whose productive spirit could not be anything but destructive, represents anarchy, which is just as important for artistic creativity as is order and harmony. 33 Stockhausen wants to appear only as the disinterested and unprejudiced bearer of a message according to which art expresses rebellion as well as social harmony, ugliness as well as beauty, and inhumanity as well as humanity. He passes no judgment, and if he does, he judges aesthetically by reflecting on the thing-in-itself as the object of appreciation. The question of authenticity, which is the second issue raised by Stockhausen, pervades the entire problematic of art and the aesthetically powerful in relation to violence and terror. As already implied, art is really art when, paradoxically, it stops being art and connects itself more and more with actual life. Art’s self-authenticating mechanism of entering reality erases art’s fictional character by giving it the opportunity to assume the role and significance of some natural presence acting in the world rather than an artificial representation that simply articulates what is already there. To put it differently, far from articulating the need of personal expression on the artistic level, art becomes fully politicized as an agency that acts on its own in the social sphere, thus enabling itself to interact with and affect the world directly.

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The inconceivable and unimaginable crash into the WTC in New York might be imagination’s atrocious way of revealing to us sarcastically, “There is more to me than meets your eye!” It’s as if deadly art all of a sudden exercised its destructive, dehumanizing power over society and everyday life, exhibiting an utterly alienating face that transgressed the traditional boundary of art as we know it, namely the category of the aesthetic, expanding to the field of the political. The assumption of a more active role by art is put eloquently by another critic: “If we do not merely settle into thinking of art as personal expression within the canonically bounded domain of the aesthetic, and we ascribe to art an active involvement . . . then we better be ready to come to terms with art as a realm in which humanity exercises its utmost creative/destructive potential, and not in the so-called (since Hegel) world of the spirit but in the world itself.” 34 The destructive potential of art was demonstrated, for instance, by the installation artist Kendell Geers who strove to remove any aesthetic distance between the viewer and the artwork. Geers fervently wished to make the audience/spectators feel threatened by his artworks, so that the supposedly primal or primeval sentiment with regard to art could be retrieved. In a work installation called “By Any Means Necessary” (1993), Geers famously put his audience at risk, thus turning representation into presence (or the symbol into the so-called “real”), by decorating the work with the following announcement: A bomb has been hidden, somewhere in this exhibition, set to explode at a time known to the artist alone. While it is not my intention to kill anyone, that risk does exist. I apologize in advance for any injuries, fatalities, damage or other inconvenience that my work will cause. In this matter I have no choice, being as much a victim of the course of Art History and contemporary politics as those who are hurt in this process. . . . Art Historians, Critics, Philosophers and Sociologists will be called upon to explain why my actions constitute a relevant work of art at this point in time. . . . The form of the piece (being what amounts to a terrorist attack) is simply a contemporary African artist’s response to the world he lives in and the histories he has inherited. 35

Geers is pondering a radically violent hit to question the conventional boundaries of art. Ostensibly, he is transforming his art into a manifesto for extravagant terrorism, at the same time that he is clothing what will be a terrorist act in eccentric artistic attire—his work installation. On a deeper level, however, Geers only wants to play on the actual fears of the audience. More importantly, he insinuates that a really authentic artist is potentially a terrorist to the extent that she revolutionizes art (or imaginative thinking) by changing the way we look at it—art is not simply a distanced aesthetic object with which we have no active engagement. In this light, authentic is the art that implicates the spectator in the artistic

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process. Moreover, it is the art that goes where no art has gone before, in the sense that it enters reality rather than limits itself to the realm of the fictional or fictitious. Authentic art or radical imagination is able to terrorize us out of our complacent posture as distanced critics and into the realization that the artwork could just as well pose a real threat to our very lives. It could be inferred that a really valuable artistic statement bears on the question of the real affinity between terrorism and imagination, or imaginative art. The contiguity between terrorism and theater/ performance art had already been graphically inscribed in Antonin Artaud’s shocking allegation, in a 1947 letter to Andre Breton, that the only language he (Artaud) could use on an audience was to “take bombs out of my pockets” and “throw them in their faces” in a gesture of “unmistakable aggression.” 36 If Breton’s statement pointed to the theoretical erasure of the boundary between actor/stage and audience or between literal and symbolic violence, later artworks such as Geers’ installation did not just reflect but also acted upon the removal of the aesthetic frame of the artwork so that the latter could actually affect the audience’s physical existence. 37 From the above we may gather that those artists who think of the September 11 attacks as a great work of art are not necessarily unfeeling or emotionally crippled persons. Artists like Stockhausen and Hirst strive to attain absolute beauty in their works by attempting to reach out to the truly authentic, which only materializes when art exceeds its artificial status and starts to affect reality. One might say that an art that claims to such a version of authenticity is an art that functions like a terrorist for humanity and creativity, insofar as it ruthlessly violates the law that dictates that art remain a representation. On an artistic level, Stockhausen seems envious (!) of the 9/11 terrorists because apparently, however outrageous that sounds, they unknowingly managed to create the greatest work of art in just one act by proving that art is presence rather than representation and, in addition, by creating something new out of ordinary material. For instance, the weapons they used, planes, an apotheosis of technology and materiality, do belong to the realm of the everyday (they fly over our heads all the time). Still, we cannot turn a blind eye to the extraordinary effect the terrorists made out of such ordinariness— they turned “friendly” technology into aggressive weaponry. Stockhausen, by contrast, allegedly never achieved the extraordinary by getting out of the normal human cycles or attaining the absolutely unfamiliar, the one thing that the world has never witnessed before or the music that has never been heard. To play the music that has never been played before, Stockhausen’s greatest desire, and thereby creating unprecedented aesthetic power (forbidden beauty?), one needs to be capable of re-creating or reforming consciousness, and that is exactly what the terrorists did. They became part of a huge artistic project that was to be performed once by people

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about to die precisely because of that project. The uncanny (but horrendous) powerfulness of the project is attributable to its instantaneous completion and the termination of everyone involved in it, including the innocent victims. At issue is the one composition that would signify in all senses the end of composition “because it would exceed all possible points of reception and interpretation, including the point of its creation.” 38 Art imbued with such finality relies upon Lucifer for reinforcing its transformative power, even though it knows that Lucifer’s destructiveness is very likely to bring its kingdom (art’s kingdom) to an end by transforming it into crude and perilous reality. Borrowing a tone of frivolity, we might liken art to an air-born mass (planes?) attacking reality (the Twin Towers?) in a suicidal mood, thus producing a gruesome excess of it (reality) that is subsequently disseminated in an artistic fashion through television, dramatization, narrative, witness accounts, and so on. By attacking reality, art becomes reality, but the intriguing part herein is that the exact point of art’s transformation into reality is the point at which authentic beauty, or rather the attractiveness of the authentic, rises in the form of the one and only terrorizing act during which, as already said, ordinariness is exceeded and the familiar is transformed into something unfamiliar. In the Critique of Judgement Kant exemplifies authentic beauty by connecting it with a kind of oscillation between familiarity and unfamiliarity or a free play between familiar and unfamiliar views—regularity and irregularity: [W]ild, and in its appearance quite irregular beauty, is only pleasing as a change to one whose eyes have become surfeited with regular beauty. . . . [B]eautiful objects have to be distinguished from beautiful views of objects. . . . In the latter case taste appears to fasten, not so much on what the imagination grasps in this field, as on the encouragement it receives in the way of invention . . . by the variety that strikes the eye. 39

A brook does not strike the eye as something impressive but a rippling brook does spark the imagination because it sustains its free play. It might be argued that the former embodies a regular beauty while the latter an irregular one, given that the mind is in this case stirred by the variety and movement of the brook’s ripples. According to Kant, people are quite familiar with regular beauty, and this familiarity leads them to appreciate it much less, having grown tired of it. On the other hand, irregular beauty is rather unfamiliar to them; therefore it is experienced as something that is inherently beautiful because it is original, an authentic experience of newness. How is such an experience of newness attained in the case of the September 11 attacks? A passenger jet is considered a state-of-the-art technological achievement, but it does not look different from hundreds of other aircraft screaming across the horizon every day. It constitutes a beauty, but only a regular one insofar as we are far too

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familiar with images of it to find it striking. However, the impossible view of such a jet swooping in on the Twin Towers that stand in themselves for regular beauty, too, creates an effect of defamiliarization because, to put it in simplistic terms, we have hardly watched a big plane attack a well-known building. 40 In essence, defamiliarization derives from the fact that although the protagonists of the episode are well-known and thus ordinary (who doesn’t know what an airplane looks like or what the World Trade Center is?), the overall effect evoked in the minds of the spectators is unprecedented and extraordinary: two familiar objects combine in an unfamiliar mode thereby yielding an authentic experience of newness, an irregular beauty, as Kant envisions it. Stockhausen’s and Hirst’s admiration derives partly from the realization of the oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar in the Twin Towers crash. The transition from familiarity to unfamiliarity and back conveys a charm to the imagination to the extent that the imagination receives the incentive to indulge in poetic fiction, stirred by the variety that strikes the eye. Such an authentic experience of newness is not disconnected from real life, inhumanity, and horror. Frank Lentricchia maintains that “aesthetic revolutionaries over the past two centuries wage polemical war on behalf of the authentic, which they habitually define as an overcoming of precisely traditional art’s ‘once removed’ character,” adding that Wordsworth’s intention to use language that was really spoken by ordinary men was not so innocent after all, since what he aspired to was not the successful conveyance of poetic feeling but, rather, the erasure of the distinction between word and thing; in other words, the erasure of the mediated character of poetry, and by extension, of art. 41 Unfortunately, to erase the mediated character of poetic language is also to come face-toface with inhumanity and horror owing to the fact that language, or art, is then deprived of its metaphorical and symbolic characteristics, thus resorting to crude and dangerous literality. Still, that is probably a risk we should take if, following the Kantian model, we are to view art and aesthetic experience in a serious and ethical way, that is, with a disinterested and unprejudiced eye that allows for the emergence of all sides of art, legitimate or illegitimate, humane or dehumanizing. “To consider the merits of [Stockhausen’s idea of the aesthetic character of the extremely violent event called ‘9/11’] would require that we put aside the virtually unavoidable sentimentality that asks us to believe that art is always somehow humane and humanizing; that artists, however indecent they might be as human beings, become noble when they make art.” 42 In Sex, Literature, and Censorship, Jonathan Dollimore supports the following: To take art seriously must be to recognize that its dangerous insights and painful beauty often derive from tendencies both disreputable and

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deeply anti-social. We know that the aesthetic vision has the power to threaten reactionary social agendas. . . . But art can also seduce us into attitudes which threaten progressive, and humanely responsible, social agendas as well. . . . Lovers of art have promulgated well-intentioned lies: they tell us that great art and the high culture it serves can only enhance the lives of those who truly appreciate it; that such art . . . is incapable of damaging or “corrupting” us. 43

In essence, what both Dollimore and Lentricchia are telling us here is that, at times, literature and art, far from confirming human values, actually oppose them. Seen in this way, art is not a utopia of good and pure intentions separated from the murkiness of the outside world. It is rather a realm where multiple creative and destructive forces operate beyond good and evil at the level of the aesthetic. To adopt an ethical stance toward art we have to acquiesce in the fact that serious art produces pleasure as well as pain, and Dollimore’s notion of painful beauty as deriving from anti-social tendencies is perfectly aligned with both Hirst’s and Stockhausen’s reception of the 9/11 attacks as something painful but aesthetically powerful. 44 In Hirst’s view, there was something utterly surreal about turning a passenger plane into a weapon of destruction, while watching people jump off the Twin Towers was a completely unreal spectacle that he, along with other artists, could not but see in an artistic way as an unprecedented and therefore highly authentic moment that only the category of the aesthetic can truly appreciate. “I remember seeing people jumping out the buildings holding hands. The whole thing was completely unreal.” 45 In Stockhausen’s view, the artistic dimension of the atrocity can be put down to the fact that the unreal became, in a single instant, real since artistic representation merged into real presence as art uncovered the aesthetic and creative potential of crude reality. An infinitely unrealistic (because beyond any imagination) murderous artwork was transformed into a fully realistic entity, given that art’s poco a poco leaps out of security occurred, in the case of the terrorist attacks, on a massive scale. TERRORISM, PERFORMANCE, AND ITS AUDIENCE Nobody could seriously have taken pleasure in an act involving the killing of three thousand people. Nonetheless, from an artistic point of view it is conceivable that one may have secretly been enticed by a perfectly orchestrated hit or performance pulled off successfully without a single “rehearsal.” Marvin Carlson, in Performance, maintains that performance requires “the physical presence of trained or skilled human beings whose demonstration of their skills is the performance.” 46 The terrorists, indeed, demonstrated their special skills in public, in front of a horrified and

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speechless nation-audience watching them perform multiple hits at two major symbols of Western power: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The attacks constituted a performance insofar as there were people to attend them, either in person or through their TV sets. The media played a very important role in the mounting of the performance, as they helped disseminate the unprecedented images of the hits and thus intensify their impact on the global community: As two critics very eloquently put it, “the news media, the terrorism specialists, and the terrorists themselves require one another in order to thrive.” 47 Terrorism feeds on the media (and vice versa) and depends upon it to promote its cause by spreading terror. Not only does terrorism rely on image, but also it chooses its target based upon the latter’s symbolic rather than real presence. 9/11 terrorists did not aim at killing as many civilians as they could but rather at sending a message by producing a horrifying image. Jean Baudrillard, in his study The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), talks about “the unforgettable incandescence of the images,” and maintains that the terrifying image “consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and offers it for consumption. Admittedly, it gives it unprecedented impact, but impact as an image event.” 48 The towers that crumbled symbolized western power and civilization which the attacks, as well as the image event produced by them, meant to mortify rather than destroy. If terrorism does not just use the media but is constituted by the media, and its purpose is not necessarily to physically destroy but rather to demoralize and intimidate via unprecedented images and words, it follows that terrorism is an aesthetic phenomenon by nature. Moreover, insofar as it appeals to the viewers’ or witnesses’ senses and bears an affective purpose, it is utterly theatrical in nature. More than 400 years ago Niccolo Machiavelli, in his seminal work The Prince, discussed the impact that a terrorizing spectacle has upon the hearts and souls of people and how a king should exploit such a spectacle to manipulate his own people thus maintaining his power. He specifically mentions how Cesare Borgia managed to terrify and appease his people in Romagna by producing brutal acts of violence in public. He first hired someone by the name Remirro de Orco to bully everyone into submission and later he had him killed in a spectacular way: “Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it. The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna for a time appeased and stupefied.” 49 We can gather from the above that public brutality and state terror are theatrical ploys. Moreover, the more spectacular the brutal (terrorist) act, the more submissive the crowds who feel relieved that it is not them that are being punished. At stake is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a combination of compassion and selfishness. Today critics insist that terrorism is a “communicative act intended to influence the behavior of one or more audiences.” 50

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Stockhausen touched upon the theatrical performativity of the 9/11 terrorists by arguing that art could never orchestrate such an impressive strike, or that no artwork could ever have such an unprecedented impact upon the crowds. 51 Regardless of whether or not he was right, the fact remains that the terrorist hit that produced so many uncanny images before our eyes (us, either as spectators of TV footage or as real eyewitnesses) constituted an unprecedented aesthetic experience. If the attacks are a performance, is it what Kant would call a beautiful one? Stockhausen presents himself as an admirer of the terrorists’ professional efficiency rather than a lover of their horrific deeds. Their atrocious attack (performance) took place in the presence of three thousand unsuspicious minds having a tragically active role in it and was witnessed by millions of others around the world. So technically speaking, it proved a huge success as spectacle. For Hirst and Stockhausen it constituted an out-of-this-world project that beat art at its own game by setting new boundaries for reality and broadening the horizons of conventional art. The project looked aesthetically powerful to them insofar as it singlehandedly took reality to another place where art supposedly hasn’t reached yet: the place of the inconceivable. Beauty in that other place is so insidious that it creeps unconsciously into a number of 9/11 horror narratives initially meant to convey the ugliness of the event. One critic, for example, has associated the 9/11 images with the chaotic but aesthetically overwhelming paintings of Hieronymus Bosch: Images of just punishment, of hell and damnation, are deep and recurrent themes in the Western imagination, and images of the New York City crash site were framed by aesthetic archetypes of apocalypse that recalled the late medieval paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Dust blotted out the sun. Day turned to night. People caught on fire, suffocated, and jumped to their death. Hysteria and wild screaming were recorded . . . and policemen were brought to their knees, and they died in abject confusion. . . . In the towers above, rich and powerful men and women . . . their sophisticated machines useless, and they died in even greater numbers. 52

In this account, aesthetic judgment/appreciation proves an ally in representing adequately the atrocity of the attacks and their immediate effects. The narrator resorts to a quasi-literary description to talk about the excruciating moments of real pain and death as he envisaged or saw them on the TV. It is not only the 9/11 footage as such that evokes images of an apocalyptic vision of art; the critical/journalistic reception of the footage, too, emerges virtually as an artistic creation assuming the form of a beautiful literary narrative of panic and real horror. As the attacks felt almost “unreal,” many journalistic accounts of them verged on the fictional and literary. Andrew O’ Hagan endorses the view that September 11 provided “a few hours when American novelists could only sit at home

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while journalism taught them fierce lessons in multivocality, point of view, the structure of plot, interior monologue . . . and the uncanny. Actuality showed its own naked art that day.” 53 The aesthetic of beauty naturally materializes also in terrorist mentality. If a 9/11 terrorist could read one of the aforementioned apocalyptic reports on the WTC attacks, he would certainly be exhilarated not only by the psychological impact of the attacks but also by their association with the ultimate Biblical signifier: Judgment Day. Aside from the obvious implications regarding the alleged death of the Christian world, such an association, from a terrorist point of view, would signify the tangible fulfilment of a crazy and forbidden fantasy, namely the destruction and humiliation of a Satanic absolute (Western) power. The perfect harmonization of the concept of absolute terrorism with its actualization and practical exertion on two major symbols of Western capitalism encapsulates terrorist beauty, or beauty in all its terrifying magnificence. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant thematizes image as never fully congruent with a concept, maintaining that an idea denotes a totality which can never be given in concreto. As he argues, “any knowledge which we can acquire still leaves us in complete uncertainty as to what should be ascribed to the object, and that while we do indeed have a concept sufficient to raise a question, we are entirely lacking in materials or power to answer the same.” 54 In short, there is concept but there is no adequate imaginative repository that can do justice to concept. Still, a momentary concretization of a concept is, I believe, at stake. What if Imagination and Reason (or concept) could be reconciled, the former being able to present accurately the totality of the latter? If that were the case, the Kantian beautiful (in its ancient Greek sense as eumorfos and in its modern Greek sense as omorfos, namely that which has an enticingly harmonious form [morfi]) would result from conceiving in imaginative terms the inconceivable in terms of reason or concept. Aesthetic judgment, for Kant, involves the harmonization of the faculties of imagination and understanding insofar as aesthetic pleasure concerns the ordinary apprehension of an object through imagination, but not without a reference to the understanding as a conceptual category. 55 In effect, to conceive the inconceivable would mean to bridge the gap between the absolute and the mundane, thus letting pure form emerge as the resolution of the aforementioned heterogeneity between image and totality. When Damian Hirst calls the 9/11 disaster visually stunning, he implies that the gap between (terrorist) conception and (terrorist) implementation was bridged, and wonders whether art could ever do the same, for instance, by uniting the ideal and the feasible. In the context of the WTC attacks, absolute aesthetic power or form was experienced as absolute terror realized on a practical, that is, mundane, level. If the September 11 terrorists theoretically conceived of an inconceivable attack and subsequently made it happen, thereby satisfying (un-

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knowingly?) the principle of beauty in the form of an unimaginable fantasy, ordinary citizens and viewers of the terrorist hit satisfied this principle too, simply by watching live an unprecedented event which they had somehow conceived of or fantasized about many times in the past, bringing to a consensus, in a way, the idea of the ultimate disaster and its practical examples in real life. But how did an innocent audience fantasize about an absolute disaster? Let us make clear that “fantasize” here does not mean “wish for” but rather “look into the possibility of.” How, then, do ordinary people look into the possibility of absolute terror? There have been innumerable Hollywood films of catastrophe with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios. As spectators, we have become so tragically accustomed to viewing well-orchestrated, albeit fictitious catastrophes on the artistic level on TV or cinema representations that we could almost admit to ourselves that we would die to witness a cinematic catastrophe in real life. As Katya Mandoki observes: That someone can watch death, pain, or a conflagration as a spectacle and feel pleasure is, unfortunately, a fact. The proof is their repeated display in films and television. This attraction to the tragic in real life explains the crowds that gather at traffic accidents or similar events, the repeated transmission of tragic and violent images in the mass media. . . . This attraction, perverse or not, amoral or immoral, is aesthetic, embarrassing as it may be. 56

Sadly, we are too deeply immersed into the culture of visual violence not to appreciate aesthetically, or take secret pleasure in, real violence when it occurs. Thus, if there lies a Kantian purposiveness in the form or image of two planes crashing into the WTC, if, that is, our idea of beauty is defined by a predetermined taste in viewing spectacular disasters, and we also have the feeling that as spectators we have earned the right to witness catastrophes of this magnitude, then there is a covert selfish feeling of satisfaction whenever we do witness them. The reason is that unconsciously we come really close to erasing the gap between art and reality by reserving for the former some of the latter’s space and vice versa, eventually blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. In Kant’s terms, absolute Terror is the concept that has found a way to talk about itself through Imagination (the images and horror of 9/11). Such a consensus of imagination and concept might lead to what Kant calls beautiful, which is precisely what artists like Hirst and Stockhausen allude to when referring to the aesthetic nature of the terrorist atrocity. I do not wish to make a political statement here in connection with the reception of the September 11 attacks, although I can’t overlook the fact that critics have often argued that people’s fantasy about the destruction of a superpower did present itself in the form of satisfaction in America’s humiliation. According to Karl Kroeber, “many people around the world loathe us now: It seems a fair guess that more than half the world’s

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population was not displeased to learn that on 11 September America suffered a bit of what it had been dealing out for decades. . . .” 57 Jean Baudrillard puts it more blatantly: “The fact that we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it—because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree—is unacceptable to . . . moral conscience. Yet it is a fact, and one which can indeed be measured by the emotive violence of all that has been said and written in the effort to dispel it.” 58 Of course Baudrillard does not mean that the terrorist attacks were justified or that America, being a superpower, should be destroyed. What he means is that contemporary society (the “West” in our case) has unnaturally, almost immorally, repressed the natural feeling that any hegemony contains potentially the seeds of its own destruction. 59 As he argues, the moral outrage ignited by the 9/11 footage was a compensation for people’s clandestine fascination with the uncanny event and their jubilation at having seen “absolute hegemony” humiliated. It was definitely immoral to feel exhilarated at such a view, but it turns out to be also tremendously unethical to stick to the idea of the eternal invulnerability of the Absolute. A number of people around the world acknowledged their secret fascination with the visual powerfulness of the thing called “September 11.” 60 As one scholar confessed, “I remember experiencing a cluster of sensations. This was a visceral experience triggered by a split-second of jubilation, synchronized with disbelief, followed instantly by horror.” 61 As the confession unfolds, however, the “split-second jubilation” is gradually revealed to be more than just a passing remark: [I]n our self-censoring times when accusations of sympathizing with terrorists are fraught with serious risks and misunderstandings, it is clearly not quite so acceptable to acknowledge “jubilation,” even for a split-second. [There is] a jouissance linked to the moment of terror, which then gets . . . subsumed in other emotions. In the moment of terror it is not as if one gloats about what one is seeing. . . . And yet, if one has to be brutally honest, there is a split-second of jubilation which one is compelled to cover up or deny at a later stage. . . . 62

To make up for their unacknowledged jubilation (or jouissance), witnesses to the 9/11 catastrophe had to resort to politically correct modes of thought—expressing their solidarity with the victims or anger at the perpetrators—thereby hiding their real (immoral) feelings underneath. On an aesthetic level, the fascination felt refers mostly to a wish-fulfilling process according to which what had so far been imagined or visualized in the world of fantasy was actually seen, watched live by millions in the real world, thus turning an ambiguous fantasy of disaster into concrete examples of what such a fantasy would be like. Kant believes that the harmonization of concept and imagination is bound up with the emergence of beautiful form as an aesthetic phenomenon/object, the assess-

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ment of which should be independent of any moral laws. From the point of view of determinant judgment, to be fascinated by the event and thus acknowledge pure aesthetic powerfulness is a crime and an immoral act. Through aesthetic/reflective judgment, though, it is not only to recognize, philosophically as well as politically, the vulnerability of absolute power, which is an immensely ethical act, but also to ponder over (or take harmless pleasure in) a spectacular and highly unanticipated scene where a giant is momentarily brought to his knees with a big thump. 63 Stockhausen is telling us that the leap out of security that occurred during the 9/11 attacks is analogous to the smaller safety-defying steps out of the ordinary taken by great art. Still, if great art requires a small degree of insecurity, an aesthetic appreciation of great art presupposes that we feel absolutely safe. To witness representations of 9/11 on the TV is to have the opportunity to safely appreciate aesthetically an unprecedented event and reflect on the danger that something similar or the same thing might have happened to oneself but fortunately did not. When Stockhausen, Hirst, and other artists articulate their enthusiasm for the aesthetic (artistic?) dimensions of the terrorist attacks, they do it from the privileged position of sheer spectatorship. In other words, they feel free to be engrossed by that unprecedented event since they were not implicated in the horror either as victims or as perpetrators. I have argued that their fascination can partly be attributed to the recognition that, at times, reality is able to reconfigure itself as the highest form of art and also open up new possibilities for artistic creativity and vision. However, like all spectators in the twenty-first century, they run the risk not of taking fiction for reality as much as taking reality for fiction, the latter proving a lot more dangerous. In a world suffused with fictionality and virtual reality, the real is frequently denied representation or even existence. One becomes accustomed to viewing fictitious scenes of raw violence; therefore a real incident would probably make no real difference. Schiller, commenting on tragic theater’s ability to train spectators in handling staged pain and adjusting to harsh reversals of fortune, argues that “the more often the mind renews [this act of self-sufficiency], the more accomplished the human spirit becomes and it acquires an ever greater advantage over sensuous urges, such that when a serious misfortune finally does arise in the midst of these imagined and artificial ones, that person is in the position to treat it as an artificial one.” 64 For Schiller, theater’s ability to familiarize spectators with (staged) pain is sufficient proof of how aesthetic education can train the subject to cope with her own predicament in life. However, his position also entails the deliberate subjugation of an individual to a beautiful fantasy, the fantasy that what one is witnessing or experiencing in one’s own life is not really happening, like the rest of the misfortunes that one has witnessed through art. Thus, when such an occasion arises there is always the possibility of treating it like a fictional predica-

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ment similar to the ones acted out on stage. In fact, 9/11 itself turned into a fictional or virtual event insofar as the “constant repetition of the attacks on the World Trade Center on satellite and TV news elicited . . . a sense of apathy or numbness to the images (though not the event itself).” 65 The translation of a horrific event into a beautiful and imaginative representation or fantasy is not unethical to the extent that it blends artistic pleasure with the concern for real pain and tribulation and with the concern for beauty and aesthetic appreciation. What I have shown in this chapter is that in discussing terror(ism) it is necessary that we also resort to aesthetics. An aesthetic assessment of history and political and social issues by no means runs counter to a serious and objective description or investigation of real life and human experience. Far from it: Aesthetic/ reflective judgment, insofar as it is morally disinterested yet ethically involved, could bypass prejudice and avoid censorship, thus offering a just and more sincere view of human activity and its representations. To secure memory of past catastrophic events requires that we willingly as well as persistently become exposed to the indescribably harsh visual evidence connected with them. Responding to accusations of callousness and heartlessness in the event of reproducing for the public real images of people falling from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, a photo editor declared that the “horror of the event and the magnitude just demanded that you get that across in a very forceful and powerful way, [therefore] when you have the image before you, it just helps convey what was really going on that day. You can’t not run a picture like that.” 66 What the editor is really saying here is that the horrible image has got to be shown precisely on account of the fact that it is horrible by association with a reality (behind it) which is just as “ugly” (and inhumane) and which needs to be done justice to. In fact, the more repellent the reality, the more appalling the “forbidden” image connected with it, hence the more urgent the ethical need to go ahead and show that image to the world despite charges of immorality and insensitivity. The morally unacceptable—thereby “forbidden”—image of destruction is indelibly imprinted on people’s minds, stimulating their imaginative faculties as well as speaking to their innermost fantasies in ways that reason and human discourse can’t. What is intriguing is that in prioritizing the terrorizing image, we (and the photo editors mentioned above) favor an aesthetics of unconscious attraction to the spectacular view yielded by the photographic reality of the pictures at hand. In other terms, a secret fascination with the unprecedented image, or even a subjective experience of the beautiful, inheres in the very act of going public with the photos. It is exactly that individual fascination that underlies the editor’s invocation of the “forceful and powerful” ways of communicating unprecedented horror.

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In the debate on terror, art, (photographic) image, and beauty assume an even greater importance in the sense that they provide views and sensations that are other than reason (they can hardly be called “reasonable”), thereby helping analyze events like 9/11 that cannot be analyzed through logic only. After all, what better way to delve into unreasonable facts but through alternative, non-reasoning, non-scientific methods? NOTES 1. A short version of this chapter first appeared as Emmanouil Aretoulakis, “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 6 (2008), sect. 1. It is used with permission. 2. Damien Hirst, Interview, BBC News Online, September 11, 2002. 3. “Attacks Called Great Art,” New York Times, September 19, 2001. 4. See chapter 1, 16. 5. Critique of Judgement, sect. 6, 42–43. 6. Ibid., sect. 2, 36–37. 7. Ibid., sect. 57, 170. 8. Ibid., sect. 49, 143. 9. Frank Lentricchia, and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6. 10. Roland Bleiker, “Aestheticizing Terrorism: Alternative Approaches to 11 September,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 49, no. 3 (2003): 443. 11. Kant never intended to assign the quality of art’s incomprehensibility or otherness to the category of the sublime, as postmodernism would have it. Otherness, according to theorists like Paul de Man and Jean-François Lyotard, is linked with the sublime and a deconstruction of aesthetics, whereas the beautiful is rather seen as aesthetics conventionalized. 12. Critique of Judgement, sect. 47, 138. 13. Ibid., sect. 46, 137. 14. Ibid., sect. 2, 37. 15. From James Allen and Hilton Als, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (New York: Twin Palms Publishing, 2000), 11. 16. Bleiker, “Aestheticizing Terrorism,” 442. 17. In fact, it remains doubtful whether one can really name the event itself. As Derrida argues, “the brevity of the appellation—9/11—stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity.” It constitutes a metonymy that points out the unqualifiable. . . .[And] we must repeat it . . . as if to exorcise two times at one go: on the one hand, to conjure away, as if by magic, the thing itself, the fear or the terror it inspires . . . and, on the other hand, to deny . . . our powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion. . . . Something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don’t know what. From Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87. 18. Joseph Kahn, “Afterimages: Joel Meyerowitz’s Photos Find Beauty Beneath the Horror of September 11,” Boston Globe, October 24, 2001, C1. 19. Hamilton Kahn, “Archival Instinct Draws Meyerowitz to ‘Ground Zero,’” Provincetown Banner, October 4, 2001, 5. 20. Devin Zuber, “Flanerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic Countermemories in Lower Manhattan,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 296.

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21. Tobin Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 31–50. 22. Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (UK: Imprint Academic, 2010), 176. 23. See my introduction. Check out also pages 84, 93, and 97 from Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry. 24. “In a similar fashion, Picasso’s Guernica is a work of art that has influenced our collective memory more than most, if not all, political analyses . . . together as it forms and re-forms political, social and historical consciousness toward a better future. Guernica is a beautiful work of art that carries within its form a fusion of individual taste and societal judgment passed upon a terrifying political situation (the Spanish civil war).” See R. Bleiker, “Aestheticizing Terrorism,” 443. 25. Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” 46. 26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie et al. (New York: Basic, 1962), 175–79. 27. “Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9–11,” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 127–32. 28. “Outbidding,” for Peter R. Neumann, is a “factor that has contributed to higher levels of brutality and lethality. . . . Where different terrorist groups or factions compete with each other for a constituency’s support, escalating the level of violence may be a promising strategy for gaining an advantage over one’s rivals. . . . The result of outbidding will be a spiral of violence in which different groups feel compelled to engage in ever more spectacular acts of violence in order to ‘top’ their rivals’ latest attacks.” See Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 140. What Neumann really says is that some terrorist groups, in order to survive as such, need to resort to certain acts of brutality that normally they would never consider committing. Neumann also refers to the “contagion effect,” that is, “the idea that terrorists watch and learn from each other,” providing the most important example of such an effect, namely the onset of suicide terrorism in Afghanistan (143–45). 29. W. J. T. Mitchell, “9/11: Criticism and Crisis,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 567–72. 30. Simon Caterson, “The Art of Terror,” Theage.com.au, October 15, 2005. 31. New York Times, September 19, 2001. 32. http://www.stockhausen.org/message_from_karlheinz.html. 33. In Paradise Lost, Milton raises destruction as pertaining to Satan’s own conception of creativity: If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labor must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil; Which oft-times may succeed, so as perhaps Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb His inmost counsels from their destined aim. (Paradise Lost, I.162) From The Poetical Works of John Milton, Vol.1: Paradise Lost, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 34. Stathis Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” Boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 55–79. 35. Excerpt cited in Ruth Kirkham, “There’s a Bomb in this Exhibition: Kendell Geers Charged,” in Parachute (July 2000), 35. 36. Antonin Artaud, Artaud on Theatre, ed. and trans. Claude Schumacher (London: Methuen, 1989), 183. Artaud attacked psychological theater and favored some form of total theater which would engage not just the spectator’s mind but his body too. See also Bernadette Buckley, “The Workshop of Filthy Creation: Or Do Not Be Alarmed, This Is Only a Test,” Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 835–57. Buckley very perceptively contends that “both terrorism and art have features which are, whether we like it or not, conflated with one another” and that “the act of differentiating

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between the two may not be as ‘obvious’ as hitherto assumed” (849). In short, the relationship between terrorism and art is more than just symbolic. 37. With regard to art’s violent infiltration of reality, one should be reminded of a dangerous artistic experiment conducted by body artist Chris Burden at the Los Angeles International Airport in 1973. In a one-time terrorist “show,” Burden fired a pistol at a 747 airliner that had just taken off from the airport. Nobody can really tell whether he was out of range when he fired, and even the FBI detained him for a few hours to question him about that “real” artistic intervention which lacked both an audience (although a picture of it was taken) and any kind of aesthetic framing. Burden’s performance “leads us to see the constitutive misanthropy at work in the very conception of art: its appeal to the realm of the unhuman, which includes not only the domains of brute material events . . . but also of identifications with . . . planes, skyscrapers, and movies.” See Daniel Cottom, “To Love to Hate,” Representations 80 (Fall 2002): 123. 38. Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” 60. 39. Critique of Judgement, sect. 22, 73–74. 40. The defamiliarization effect was posited by Russian Formalism. Viktor Shklovsky, in his essay called “Art As Technique,” refers to how Tolstoy “describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, and makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object.” According to Shklovsky, “Tolstoy uses this technique of defamiliarization constantly.” See Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 16. 41. Lentricchia and McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror, 8. 42. Ibid., 9. 43. Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), xi. 44. “Art is increasingly viewed as useless for society today unless it makes one feel good.” Siebers, “Kant and the Politics of Beauty,” 43. 45. Hirst, BBC News Online. 46. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3. 47. Joseba Zulaika and William A Douglass, Terror and Taboo, The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 4. 48. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 13. 49. Quoted in Mikko Lahtinen, Politics and Philosophy: Niccolo Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism, trans. Garth Griffiths, and Kristina Kohli (Koninklijke Brill, NV: Leiden, 2009), 260. 50. Randall D. Law, Terrorism. A History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 3. 51. “Attacks Called Great Art,” New York Times, September 19, 2001. 52. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and ‘September 11,’” Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (March 2004): 88–105. 53. Andrew O’ Hagan, “Racing Against Reality,” New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jun/28/racing-against-reality/. 54. An Idea cannot be shown in its absolute totality: “Even if we suppose the whole of nature to be spread out before us, and that of all that is presented to our intuition nothing is concealed from our senses and consciousness, yet still through no experience of our ideas be known by us in concreto.” Excerpt from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, sect. 4, 434. 55. Critique of Judgement, sect. 39, 122. Such “apprehension,” I would add, would have to be momentary, so that it would not jeopardize (the elusiveness of) beauty as nonconceptual entity. 56. Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Plan of Culture and Social Identities (Ashgate, 2007), 38. 57. “Thoughts on September 11,” Boundary 2 29, no. 1 (2002): 269–71. 58. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 5.

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59. Baudrillard was quick to renounce the attacks: “I do not praise murderous attacks—that would be idiotic. . . . I have endeavored to analyze the process through which the unbounded expansion of globalization creates the conditions for its own destruction.” See Jean Baudrillard, “This is the Fourth World War,” an interview with Der Spiegel, 2002; refer to the translation in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 1, no. 1 (January 2004). 60. That “secret” fascination was not secret at all in the case of a small number of Palestinians who were allegedly shown repeatedly on the TV “celebrating and handing out sweets in response to the breaking news.” Check out Fauzia Ahmad, “British Muslim Perceptions and Opinions on News Coverage of September 11,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32, no. 6 (August 2006): 962. 61. Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2014), 42–43. 62. Ibid., 43. 63. Of course, religious and political groups adhering to an anti-American ideology would normally have a heightened sense of the aesthetics of the terrorist attack. For instance, a Shi leader connected with Hizbullah admitted that his first reaction to the images of the attack was “shouting Allahu Akbar (God is Great). For him the gruesome sight was one of redemption, which he saw in isolation of the death and destruction caused by the crash.” See Simon Haddad and Hilal Khashan, “Lebanese Muslim Views of September 11,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 2 (2003): 298. In this case, if there is a “beauty” in the attacks, it stems mostly from the moral legitimacy that a terrorist strike against the United States (the “falling giant”) has in the Shi leader’s mind. According to a survey conducted in Beirut in October and November 2001, a “sweeping majority” of the respondents—Sunni and Shi Muslims— felt that the September 11 attacks were legitimized by “Arab grievances against the United States,” whereas one-third of them “reported deriving emotional gratification from the images generated by the destruction of New York’s twin towers (my emphasis).” In fact, more than one-third of the respondents “would support follow-up attacks” by Islamists, including the use of nuclear weapons! See Haddad and Khashan, 294. 64. Friedrich von Schiller, “On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas),” in Essays [1801], ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum Books, 1993), 82–83. See also Charles H. Hinnant, “Schiller and the Political Sublime: Two Perspectives,” Criticism 44, no. 2 (2002): 1. 65. Ahmad, 973. For a more detailed explanation of the fictionalization of the 9/11 attacks see Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2012), 12–20. Therein, Zizek argues that 9/11 does not embody the intrusion of the real into our lives but rather the attack of a fantasmatic catastrophe image on reality (19). 66. Renee Martin Kratzer and Brian Kratzer, “How Newspapers Decided to Run Disturbing 9/11 Photos,” in Media in an American Crisis: Studies of September 11, 2001, ed. Elinor Kelley Crusin (New York: University Press of America, 2005), 30.

THREE The Nuclear Image and the Forbidden Aesthetics of Beauty

The forbidden aesthetics that I forwarded in the previous chapter will now be discussed in terms of the one of the biggest disasters of the twentieth century, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear holocaust in 1945. 1 As I have already argued in my introduction, this terrifying event does constitute terrorism insofar as it physically and symbolically brought an entire nation to its knees by means of a sudden, totally unprecedented (perhaps totally uncalled for), asymmetric strike. Osama Bin Laden called the September 11 attacks a “Hiroshima in America.” 2 That was a playful aphorism that would classify openly the Hiroshima bombing under the category of “spectacular massive terrorism,” both in outcome and intention. According to recent criticism, “Hiroshima realizes the qualitatively new potential for genocidal destruction inherent in the project of modernist science itself. . . . [T]he all-too-real doomsday weapon—the so-called weapon of mass destruction or WMD—set the new standards for terror and sublimity.” 3 The Hiroshima genocide admittedly raised the bar for terror as well as terrorism from within the modernist project. This is how the modern theorist Jessica Stern defines terrorism: I define terrorism as an act or threat of violence against noncombatants with the objective of exacting revenge, intimidating, or otherwise influencing an audience. This definition avoids limiting perpetrator or purpose. It allows for a range of possible actors (states or their surrogates, international groups, or a single individual), for all putative goals (political, religious, or economic), and for murder for its own sake. 4

It is hard to overlook Stern’s use of theatrical terms, such as “audience” and “actors,” in her conceptualization of terrorism. Terrorism is a theatrical performance, she seems to imply, which is meant to intimidate or 63

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terrify a certain audience by striking against noncombatants or groups that are not directly involved in the “cause” of the terrorists. The nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted an unprecedented, totally theatrical and absolutely terrifying random strike against noncombatants. Consequently, it should be seen as a terrorist act par excellence, insofar as the United States (or the Allied forces) “clearly intended to terrorize Japan into submission when it dropped atomic bombs,” which amounted to shock action. 5 Derrida explicitly called into question the traditional distinction between terrorism and war (the latter conveniently translatable as “freedom fighting”) by calling attention to the indubitable fact that throughout history entire states, not necessarily belonging to an “axis of evil,” have engaged in terrorist tactics against civilians in wartime. 6 Doesn’t that make them “terrorist” enough? Or, by contrast, is the possibility of terrorism ruled out once one enters a justifiable or non-justifiable war, from which ensues that all military action will be seen as a priori absolutely legitimate and “normal”? It is highly likely that an act of terror is precisely that—a terrorist act—whether in wartime or in peace, despite Kant’s declaration that war could be conducted in such an “orderly” (hence, non-terrorist, or non-terrorizing) fashion that the rights of noncombatant populations are respected, and a feeling of the sublimity and harmonious beauty of warfare emerges as a result. 7 To speak of and represent Hiroshima in horror is nothing new, and we will justifiably keep doing so in the future. Let us, though, take a look at an alternative view of the Hiroshima event shortly after the bomb was dropped: “Navy Day, October 1945, a crowd of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to celebrate a simulated re-enactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete with a mushroom cloud that rises from the fifty yard line to the joyful cheers of that rapt throng.” 8 Two months after the terrifying incident, people in America were celebrating the decisiveness of the strike and its unprecedented spectacularity in the shape of a magnificent mushroom, an almost phallic-like symbol of awesome power. The people, that is, were exulting over the beautiful spectacle created by a strange new weapon that helped them win the war. Naturally, one cannot seriously charge the Los Angeles crowd with insensitivity to the “enemy’s” infinite misery. Especially as far as the American public was concerned, the nuclear detonation over Japanese territory was fully justified and morally legitimate. In fact, toward the end of the war at least a quarter of the American population thought that perhaps more atomic bombs were required against a nation which, to their eyes, embodied something already dehumanized and culturally inferior, let alone evil. The Office of War Information had evidently performed miracles in manipulating public opinion and forcing upon Americans the view that the Japanese, being utterly fanatical, lacked indi-

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viduality and logic; in short, that they had no subjectivity and therefore deserved no respect or solidarity. In view of all the above, it may be deemed natural that the people gathered in the Los Angeles Coliseum should be excited at the visually captivating re-enactment of the nuclear explosion since in their own minds the bomb had affected only primitive subhuman entities or ants rather than real people—and nobody thinks hard before crushing an ant. 9 What is of utmost importance, at this point, relates to the degree in which the supposed moral legitimacy of the nuclear attacks reinforced the viewers’ (already heightened) sense of the beautiful before the image of the mushroom cloud. In other words, the image at hand became more appealing and attractive precisely because it was associated with the destruction of an inimical and morally as well as culturally inferior nation. That is one blatant example of how morality may refashion the way we feel about people, things and representations by either blunting our sensibilities and aesthetic instincts or, to the contrary, sharpening them. In any case, that thousands of the (non-combatant) inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki chosen at random were evaporated in a single instant was automatically of secondary importance, compared to the exhilaration felt at such a beautiful and symbol-laden sight. Sadly or not, a secret admiration for the excruciating image of the nuclear mushroom cloud continues to perplex humanity till today. Regrettably the image itself has repressed, and continues to repress, something horrendous underneath: the reality of total destruction. Hiroshima was one of the very first instances of massive, globalized, terrorism. Although the nuclear attack was not televisually accessible to the general public (still, it was caught on tape), it was imprinted on people’s minds through the occurrence of an extremely unfamiliar but mesmerizing visual event, the rise of the mushroom cloud—a rather benign symbol of creation—leading them to appreciate aesthetically the distant apocalypse of a nation—the Japanese—that “had it coming.” There is no doubt that what has usually been disseminated by global media of that unforgettable event of total terrorism concerns not so much the mass killing and total destruction but the mushroom cloud arising as a result. The dropping of the bomb and its aftermath, that is, were repressed in public memory and replaced by the fully aesthetic image of the mushroom cloud: a flawless image signifying a flawless attack, the “perfect ending” of a world conflict. LOS ALAMOS: NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS AS POETS The aesthetical power of the bomb and a taste of its unprecedented potential for destruction had already been experienced firsthand by the Los Alamos scientists in New Mexico during the first successful test of the

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Figure 3.1. A "beautiful" atomic explosion in the Bikini island, July 1946. Credit: United States Department of Defense.

bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month from its use on real enemy ground. For those scientists—notably, Drs. Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, and Neumann—the entire experience was surreal and fully aesthetic, in the sense that they had to grasp it with all their senses in order to capture its utter destructiveness. More particularly, one scientist described it as “the biggest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever.” 10 Robert Oppenheimer simply gave an account of the blast’s uncanny effect on the witnesses: “We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. . . . Most people were silent.” 11 The rather poetic, abstract, and deeply ritualistic experience described by Oppenheimer bears on a Kantian take on the dynamic sublime as a quasi-physical feeling of awe that is eventually contained by the rationalizing process of the mind which dictates that human intellect will finally prevail. Oppenheimer was not physically touched by the explosion. Other workers and scientists were more directly exposed to the ruthless force of the atomic blast: Some went blind for a few seconds; others were knocked off their feet. Those people experienced, in a way, a feeling of primitive terror evoked by the elimination of the distance between the terrifying object and the observer. Both groups, however, got a glimpse, even for an infinitesimal moment, of an unprecedented view that engaged all five senses in a spectacular—and indeed beautiful—image or spectacle. Surprisingly, the witnesses felt that the more beautiful the spectacle, the more successful the test.

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The aesthetic image/dimension of the bomb was reinforced by the fact that the scientists involved in the project compared the destructive device to the innocent body of a baby: “It’s a boy,” announced Edward Teller during the first successful test of the thermonuclear bomb, later, in 1952. Joseph Masco, in a remarkable study on human sensibility in relation to the building of the nuclear bomb, argues that “[b]y describing a thermonuclear detonation through procreative and masculine metaphors (presumably a ‘girl’ would not explode), weapons scientists were not only positively valuing their achievement as a form of creation but also working to linguistically contain the destructive reality of the event.” 12 After aboveground nuclear tests were banned in 1962, nuclear scientists stopped having a direct sensory experience either of blasts or their effects, something that led to the “intellectualization” of their involvement in the tests. Thus, they could merely guess or calculate by analyzing computer data, and it was only in retrospect that they could safely say whether or not a test was successful. The terrifying aesthetics of nuclear explosions ostensibly succumbed, during that period, to rationality and human intellect. Simultaneously, the new development—the aboveground test ban—resulted in the physical disappearance of the nuclear device which was suddenly turned, through its absence, into an object of beauty, indeed a secret artwork, a perfected creation with infinite destructive force that should by no means be unleashed. That was the age of deterrence. It was an age when that beautiful artwork had to be framed or put away in the museum of missed nuclear opportunity, so to speak. Ironically, it was during the post-Cold War period—especially after 1992 when all kinds of nuclear tests were banned—that the bomb alongside its full aesthetic and destructive magnificence returned with a vengeance. 13 The time had come for nuclear scientists to resume their full aesthetic/sensory engagement with the bomb through three-dimensional computer simulations of nuclear explosions (in Los Alamos) that they did not just witness or hear, but also touched and interacted with. The reinstatement of sensory experience which led to an unhindered aesthetic appreciation of something, until then, inconceivable and inaccessible deprived the bomb of its lethal destructiveness, thereby alleviating the terror related to it. On the other hand, the domestication of cutting-edge technology that transforms, through simulation, distant sublimity into tactile radical beauty may just as well have the side-effect of reducing the beautiful (or visually compelling) object to an object of conventional pleasure, insofar as whatever we have experienced a number of times in the past we tend to shrug off, forget or disdain. By and large, however, simulation helped scientists to overcome the problem of fear and overwhelming terror, thus allowing them to indulge in a beautiful spectacle whose proximity to the human was without precedent. Terror was there somehow, but an aesthetic appreciation of terror was there too. Masco puts it in an enticing way:

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Chapter 3 The bomb’s new body is increasingly that of the weapons scientists themselves, as the intellectual pleasure of nuclear weapons science and a tactile sensory experience of the exploding bomb are being merged through a massively engineered technoaesthetic spectacle in virtual reality. The intimacy of this conceptual project . . . eliminates fear of the exploding bomb altogether in favour of a phantasmagoria. This flooding of the senses with virtual images of a detonating nuclear device reinvents the bomb as a purely creative project—more visible in its details, more compelling in its sensory form, and more attractive in its technoaesthetic performance. 14

It can be inferred from the excerpt above that a forbidden (that is, socially unacceptable because “immoral”) aesthetics of pleasure is implicated in the effort to understand omnipotent destructive technology. Today, nuclear scientists may see themselves as terror’s accomplices, or rather accomplices in terror, by letting themselves in on the dark secrets of a nuclear blast. Obviously, the more astonishing and visually captivating are the forbidden (simulated) images, the more effective and to-the-point are the scientific analyses afterward. The image leads and the object follows insofar as the scope of the latter is determined and broadened by the captivating beauty of the former. We have already referred to Heidegger’s insight that image is intrinsically pre-conceptual, in the sense that it belongs to a realm which is prior to the world of reason and concept. 15 Image appeals to our imaginative skills, while concept appeals to our cognitive and rational abilities. In this light, image as imagination is an unconscious figure or effect that is extraneous to the effects and procedures of consciousness. Thus, image is expelled from conceptual language precisely because it cannot harmonize itself with a non-dreamlike reality. The air crash into the WTC, as explained in the previous chapter, exemplifies the emergence of such a pre-conceptual image that bears on the reality of imagination or the dream. The image of two planes crashing into the Τwin Τowers in New York belongs to the realm of imagination in the sense that, as has been demonstrated, it illustrates something unprecedented as well as infinitely “imaginative.” At the same time, it represents something, up to that chronological point, imaginary—a fantasy, though, that came true. Inexplicable beauty in the form of preconceptual image takes over the minds of the nuclear scientists at work on the project of nuclear fission— the so-called “Manhattan Project.” It turns out that the otherwise utterly positivist scientists need to take to the faculty of artistic imagination to be able to absorb and comprehend the wonders performed by the atom and electrons before their astonished faces: Even the most brilliant scientists at moments expressed astonishment at the intangible, uncertain realm in which the familiar laws of gravity, mass, and motion did not apply; some even believed that language itself could not capture the atom’s essential weirdness. To the extent

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that the atomic scientists were able to describe and interpret their bizarre subject, they had to exercise a faculty more often associated with artists than with people such as themselves—the imagination. Indeed, the deeper the scientists probed, the greater the need to conjure unexpected, fantastical, wondrous things. . . . Although wonder had no place in their formal writings, the atomic scientists could not suppress it. 16

The Los Alamos scientists apparently had to become artists alert to the workings of imagination to be able to describe, or account for, the unprecedented beauty engendered by the atom’s wonderfully erratic behavior. Τhe scientists/artists could not but feel the need to “conjure unexpected, fantastical, wondrous things” in their desperate attempt to render their analyses more scientific and objective, since they were aware that purely scientific language and rational reflection were not capable of illustrating accurately the bizarre processes at hand. Thus, the wondrous as “wonderful” as well as “fantastic” gradually became the main focus of their study. Paradoxically, the more accurate, realistic, and to-the-point their scientific accounts, the more artistic and imagination-driven their conclusions. As Kant has shown in the Critique of Judgement, authentic beauty bears on the continuous interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar. While regular or conventional beauty is something familiar to us, as we have witnessed it before, irregular, radical, beauty—the quintessence of beauty—is necessarily associated with an unfamiliar view or feeling. For Kant, a brook may be beautiful, but it is incomparable to the authentic beauty of a rippling brook which sparks the imagination by sustaining its free play. 17 In a similar fashion, the Los Alamos scientists feel exhilarated at the absolutely uncanny view of familiar elements behaving in an unexpected, hence unfamiliar way, thereby producing radical beauty as the wonderfully authentic experience of newness. For Kant, beauty is already a radical notion or experience insofar as it inhabits an imaginative place that is other than the place that we conventionally inhabit, namely, the realm of concept and reason. The nuclear physicists have gone beyond that familiar and conventional realm, getting a taste of authentic (because unprecedented and preconceptual) beauty. One cannot emphasize enough the importance of empowering aesthetics (as aesthesis, the feeling and the emotive) rather than positivist and scientific language in the discourse of nuclear science. More significantly, one cannot overlook how the image of radical, unprecedented beauty, in a Kantian sense, haunts the narrative and thoughts of the nuclear physicists themselves: “‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ blurted an assistant to Julian Mack (1903–1966),” “the test was ‘wonderful,’ said David Inglis,” while Victor Weisskopf “recalled that ‘an aureole of bluish light’ around the fireball reminded him of a medieval painting of Jesus ascending to heaven in a bright yellow sphere surrounded by a blue halo.” 18 The spontaneous reaction at the unbelievable sight of the explosion was

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uncannily aesthetic, by way of pointing to a beautiful rather than appalling aspect of the mushroom cloud. The image of the bomb even takes on artistic dimensions by being associated with a medieval painting, which raises the question of whether the nuclear bomb is felt to be a work of art—hence, creative rather than destructive—or not. What is more, the image itself is not associated with just any randomly chosen pictorial artwork but specifically with the resurrected figure of Christ ascending to heaven, which naturally clothes the event in religious and fully Christian attire. Apparently, the image of the bomb (and the bomb itself) is thought to demonstrate a benign and inherently “good” nature rather than a malignant, satanic forcefulness. But how moral are we to identify an infinitely destructive weapon, the embodiment of utter annihilation, with something aesthetically beautiful or even artistic? Aren’t the Los Alamos scientists exhibiting insensitive or irresponsible behavior by not focusing exclusively upon the atrocious effects of their creation on the future of mankind? The invocation of beauty and the acknowledgment of the bomb’s dehumanizing consequences in the same breath are not necessarily in contradistinction with each other. The scientists’ attitude cannot be viewed through the lens of traditional morality, insofar as it appears to be founded upon aesthetic rather than moral appreciation. Using Kant’s terminology, the Los Alamos scientists assess what they are witnessing from the standpoint of reflective (aesthetic), not determinant, judgment. Their judgment, that is, hinges upon a disinterested response at the sight of the mushroom cloud, a response which is based upon a posteriori assessment. In other words, they are only responding spontaneously to the spectacular picture that is drawn before their eyes. At the very moment of the explosion, they are not preoccupied with the moral implications or consequences of the nuclear event because that would virtually call attention to something extraneous to the event itself. Aesthetic or reflective judgment, as we have seen, judges a posteriori, after the fact, in the sense that it is not determined or affected by moral preconceptions—such as prejudice—or universal laws dictating a priori what is right and wrong, moral or immoral. Therefore, that kind of judgment is considered to be disinterested and more authentic and humane to the extent that it remains independent of the morally involved and far more “interested” appreciation effected by determinant judgment, which looks to the universal rather than the particular for establishing laws of (im)morality. In this light, paying close attention, through aesthetic judgment, to the spectacularity of the bomb and the ensuing mushroom cloud allows the scientists/witnesses to assess more accurately the magnitude of the destructive event and understand more deeply—less through cognition, more through imagination—the reality and function of the nucleus whose unfamiliarly erratic behavior can be described effectively through non-scientific language. At the same time, to witness aesthetical-

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ly as well as wonder at the overpowering images of the nuclear effects is to retain deeply in one’s memory the picture of utter destructiveness effected by the bomb on a physical, emotional and psychological level, which is undeniably an ethical act insofar as it is only through the preservation of the memory (or the image) of nuclear destruction that a more ethically involved and responsible use of nuclear power can be realized. Peggy Rosenthal touches upon the importance of the visual presence of the bomb for the consolidation of an ethically sound attitude toward nuclear weapons by reminding us that at the time of the Aboveground Test Ban (1962–1963) Los Alamos former director Harold Agnew had allegedly recommended that “the treaty contain a provision for world leaders to gather once a year to watch an aboveground nuclear test, so that they’d see what awful power they had in their hands and hence wouldn’t be tempted to use it.” 19 What Agnew meant was that humans— both scientists and laymen, world leaders and common people—need to experience firsthand nuclear power once in a while, so that they remain absolutely certain about the deterrence imperative: campaigning against the generalized use of nuclear power as weapon of mass destruction. Rosenthal seems to agree to this logic. Humans need to see in order to believe. As she argues, “the mushroom-cloud symbol has perhaps been serving a comparable deterrent purpose for the general culture. . . . It keeps its powerful meanings dramatically before us and so sustains our collective sense of urgency about them.” 20 To be able to witness the mushroom cloud is not to let the painful memory of nuclear destruction slip away. But to bear witness to such an iconic image in the context of securing an ethical treatment of nuclear power and vision involves also the unconscious act of aestheticizing the forbidden icon/image by means of reflective judgment. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell’s account of the first Trinity Test at Los Alamos—one of the first written accounts of the event—discloses an unprecedented aesthetics of beauty lurking behind the “big bang” of the nuclear blast: The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No manmade phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violent, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. 21

One could hardly have expected from a general to produce such purely literary description of the magnificent sight as the one above. Farrell refers to beautiful colors, lighting effects, and mountain ranges lit by

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multiple suns as if he were trying to make the case that when the dramatic demonstration of utter destruction reaches its peak, it manages to cross over to the realm of indescribably radical beauty. The unnatural images allegedly evoke in Farrell’s mind pictures that the most ingenious painters of the world were burned to draw but never did; beauties that the greatest poets proved too petty to describe. It seems paradoxical that in order to give an objective account of the most sophisticated scientific breakthrough man has ever known one has to reconnect with one’s own sensibilities by resorting to feeling, the faculty of imagination and the world of poetry. Still, it is not paradoxical at all if we consider the possibility that real (authentic) beauty enters only at the very moment that reason and cognition exit, which probably suggests that to describe the indescribable accurately you have to let go of your cognitive and conceptual faculties: Ironically, to be truly objective you have to stop being objective! AUTHENTIC ART AND THE NUCLEAR BLAST But what does that “tremendous” “manmade phenomenon” have to do with poets and their dreams? Are the nuclear blast and its visual byproducts art? Are we watching authentic art in the making, then? The blast, along with its enticingly unfolding optic illusions, is definitely not art even though, as we have already noted, we may frequently discuss a non-art object as if it were artistic in order to emphasize its visual powerfulness. However, visual powerfulness does not count as artistry. Something can be visually captivating without being (seen as) art. Nevertheless, what feels artistic-like is the indubitable aesthetic experience usually connected with an attractive or spectacular view, in this case, with the specific “terrorist” incident at hand—terrorist in the sense of (aiming at) causing pure, unmediated, terror in the human soul. In order to do justice to the overwhelming phenomenon that he is witnessing, Farrell is compelled to activate his sensory power, in other words to engage in an aesthetic rather than cognitive or moral appreciation of the event. More particularly, he has to engage in an appreciation of the sheer beauty of the event. This kind of appreciation can be very well likened to the appreciation that Damien Hirst had of the entire “spectacle” of 9/11 as something visually beautiful; it is also very similar to Stockhausen’s admiration for the supposedly flawless “performance” mounted in front of millions of spectators, a performance that, as the composer argued, cannot possibly be rivaled even by the most ambitious artistic attempts to depict perfection. Even though Farrell is not an artist like Hirst or Stockhausen, he still feels the need to resort to aesthetics in order to comprehend his very own experience. His approach is aesthetic insofar as it is morally disinterested.

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“Disinterested,” of course, does not mean “uninterested” or immoral. He is disinterested to the extent that his mind has become absorbed by the sheer image and feeling of the explosion, and thus, for a moment, he cannot afford to be preoccupied with the ethical dimension of nuclear power and its destructive impact upon humanity. In other words, by being overwhelmed by the “now-ness” of the unprecedented event he cannot afford to look “before” or “after” the enthralling image or spectacle, that is, for instance, to look at the inherently dehumanizing principles and precepts underlying the use of nuclear technology or at the terrifying consequences of using it. If Farrell were concerned mostly with the imperatives and practical consequences of the nuclear blast, he would definitely have been so horrified by its ominous prospects that he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be aesthetically moved by the spectacular view of the mushroom cloud. Kant would hold that that would have been a typical case of determinant judgment: a judgment that appraises the particular through the perspective of the universal, and herein, an assessment of the particular aesthetics of the unprecedented image of the mushroom cloud through the lens of the universal law of conventional morality that dictates that an image which is associated with future demonstrations of immorality by no means be deemed “beautiful.” But what is at stake in Farrell’s case is an aesthetic, rather than determinant, judgment of the nuclear blast. Such a judgment is directed from the particular to the universal, which basically means that the rules of judgment (the universal) are not given in advance, but are rather determined by the particular characteristics of the specific object/event to be judged. Therefore, appreciation occurs only after the fact rather than a priori. In essence, aesthetic appreciation precludes the formation of any rule or mental preconception until the object/event has materialized. The rule will be configured after the object has arrived, which entails that there will probably be no moral inhibition or prejudice obviating the work of judgment. Instead, the object/event is to be appreciated in a disinterested—thus much more objective—way, by which one may judge independently of morality or logic. Farrell further complicates his account of the unanticipated scene/image by mentioning also the emergence of a “beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.” Using Kantian-like terminology, we may argue that he is unknowingly bringing up the question of authentic beauty as that astonishing, non-commonplace view that stirs the imagination. For beauty to be authentic, it has to be grounded upon no prescribed or already known rules involving cognition and rationalization; to be authentic, beauty has got to be surprising, which essentially amounts to saying that surprise provides that momentary shock that automatically opens up the space of imagination; the latter (imagination), in turn, generates in the mind un-

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canny images catching the viewer off guard since they are extraneous to the acceptable set of rules or laws governing art or aesthetic experience. The beauty that Farrell is talking about seems to be unable to fit in with the model of beauty with which we are already familiar: It goes beyond the common or commonplace, and that is why it cannot possibly be put into specific words. Now, we have already referred to how the general conflates the beauty of the aesthetic experience at hand with artistic beauty (“the beauty that great poets dream about”). In other words, he feels the element of authenticity in the spectacle of the nuclear blast, both, as a captivating aesthetic experience and as a new, groundbreaking and astonishing artwork. Yet, isn’t art supposed to be fictitious and artificial by nature? And isn’t the blast, by contrast, absolutely real therefore not art? For radical artists (like Stockhausen, as we saw in the previous chapter) art does not necessarily belong to the unreal exclusively. Great art might have to go beyond the fictional and the artificial by flirting openly with reality itself; indeed, by generating or reconfiguring reality. How does that happen? By pulling down the edifice of representation and bringing to the fore the thing itself, namely presence or presentation. In what ways does that connect with Farrell’s intriguing report on the nuclear event as a beautiful representation as well as beautiful artwork? Well, what is extraordinarily implied in his statement is that not only does the authentic beauty of the nuclear mushroom cloud subvert our common assumptions/rules about what “beautiful” means, namely an aesthetic object which is harmlessly admired, but it also transgresses the basic (albeit unwritten) law according to which art should remain a fictional representation rather than engage actively with the individual. As soon as the nuclear bomb went off for the first time, it produced uncanny, art-like, images that exceeded known reality. Simultaneously those images produced an excess of reality by causing the real to “explode” both literally and metaphorically. This is the point at which art stopped being mere representation and entered the domain of the ruthlessly real—the so-called “thing itself”—at the same time that it reconfigured the nature of reality. The bomb and the ensuing surreal imagery signify a new reality which is in excess of the mundane and commonplace in the known world. At the same time, the blast and the images generate an excess of reality—too many dead or vaporized bodies on the spot, for instance— thereby energizing an artistic infatuation with the real world rather than the world of artifice; the world of presence rather than the world of representation. In the final analysis, the gruesome nuclear reality is not to be marked off from the benign world of aesthetic reflection and artistic representation. On the contrary, the gory real becomes the arena of authentic art, not in the sense that the latter does justice to or imitates the former (by illustrating it), but rather that the former (gory reality) takes over from the benign, distanced and safe appreciation of art by establish-

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ing itself as a “terrorist” artistic presence acting inside the real world. In a way, what is at issue is the appropriation, by terrorist nuclear reality, of art’s properties. Simply said, both the imagery of the nuclear blast and the blast itself are beginning to be felt like, rather than declared openly as, great forms of art. That feeling, rather than open declaration, is a feeling of secret fascination with something morally forbidden but visually captivating. NUCLEAR TERRORISM IN NEW YORK? Long before 9/11, there had been social as well as political studies that inquired into the possibility of nuclear terror actually coming to New York. One of those studies anticipates unknowingly the terrorist crashes into the Twin Towers but visualizes them as a nuclear attack—possibly a projection of the Western fear of retaliation for the Hiroshima/Nagasaki horror, or a wish-fulfilling process through which America would make amends for what it did to the Japanese people by fantasizing about a commensurate strike against American noncombatants. The author, Jessica Stern, begins by asking the following rhetorical question: What if terrorists exploded a homemade nuclear bomb at the Empire State Building in New York City? A one-kiloton nuclear device—tiny by superpower standards—would ignite a fireball 300 feet in diameter that would demolish the Empire State Building and the 20,000 people who work there. . . . A shock wave would spread out from the blast site, exposing everything in its path to pressure as high as thousands of pounds per square inch. . . . Gas mains would rupture, causing widespread fires. A bright light, many times brighter than the sun in the desert at noon, would be visible from neighboring states. . . . In the first twenty-four hours radioactive particles . . . would descend from the sky. A lethal dose would be delivered to anyone within an area a quarter-mile wide and nine miles long. . . . Small radioactive particles would eventually be deposited over much of the earth. Because the bomb would explode close to the ground, the effects of fallout would be far more severe than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. 22

The last sentence of the excerpt gives us to understand that it is a “your pain against my pain” type of thing. The author portrays New York as a city that would be far more shockingly destroyed than Hiroshima could ever have been, thereby alleviating somehow the American trauma of guilt and shame. For the sake of the argument she provides a concise description of what would definitely happen if nuclear hell should break loose in downtown New York. This overly descriptive narrative of hypothetical horror relies too much on the power of words and images to convey nuclear reality. In short, it relies on literariness and the aesthetic

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for putting its point across, namely, persuading readers that the nuclear mushroom is not just a figure of speech but a tangible terrorist option. Aside from the fact that by throwing into her narrative all those graphic details connected with an unprecedented nuclear reality she manages to turn America, at least on an imaginary level, into a victim of nuclear disaster, she also yields an absolutely aesthetic narration of future reality. The reference to a “bright light, many times brighter than the sun in the desert at noon” activates imagination, the power of the mind to imagine or visualize the unprecedented. We have to read the excerpt over and over again in order to comprehend the inexplicable pleasure we derive from simply reflecting upon the possibility of ultimate terror. Undoubtedly, the reader is unashamedly fascinated by the beautiful narrative of nuclear destruction, and needs to indulge into the minutest details of horror therein, so that she can grasp aesthetically (and thus comprehend ethically) the entire fantastic experience of nuclear terrorism at the heart of the Western world. Literature treats you to a fictitious experience turned real in the process. After all, there was a terrorist strike in New York—9/11—only it did not involve nuclear fission. But can such a kind of forbidden beauty “think”? The question could be rephrased as follows: Is there any ethical value in the appreciation of forbidden (nuclear) beauty? Is there any latitude for responsible and ethically committed thought in freely acknowledging and appraising forbidden beauty? An independent and free judgment of beauty, as has already been insisted upon in this project, is by no means unethical. On the contrary, it is pivotal in understanding horror. Let us assume that Stern had limited her analysis to making purely cognitive remarks about nuclear apocalypse in New York, for instance, the remark that “a nuclear explosion in NYC would be an unthinkable disaster.” The cognitive value of that statement is indisputable to the extent that it communicates a concise and unequivocal message. Still, such a statement would pale compared to an utterance emerging directly from one’s own imagination. What Stern is really articulating is not a journalistic account of the exact second of a hypothetical nuclear explosion and its aftermath; neither is it a rationalized display of a “disastrous” assumption. Far from presenting a normalized—therefore innocuous—description of a potential nuclear event, Stern seems to be relying on the power of imagination to evoke archetypal, albeit fully realistic, images of absolute destruction connected to a nuclear apocalypse. At issue is an aestheticized visualization of raw nuclear reality insofar as one has to activate one’s five senses to truly grasp the magnitude of the horror involved in, as well as the ethical catastrophe ensuing from, that possibility. To ponder over unprecedented nuclear disaster on Western territory is to peer into every single visual detail in Stern’s narrative that shocks the reader/ spectator by means of decelerating the rhythm of the representation,

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thereby defamiliarizing catastrophe and, paradoxically, “re-acquainting” the public with the horror of a nuclear accident or warfare. But why is it important to re-familiarize the public with disaster? On second thought, aren’t we all too familiar already with images of horror and catastrophe through our exposure to disaster Hollywood films or even television footage from real catastrophes around the world? When it comes to representing nuclear holocaust, as Edmund F. Byrne argues, American films are “harmless and therefore extremely dangerous to our health.” The problem lies in that “we are not being given the benefit of any realistic apocalyptic vision with regard to the horror of nuclear holocaust (this being to the whole earth what a bomb is to one city).” 23 Byrne seems to be in the right. We think we know what it is like to bear witness to, or, worse, experience from the inside an actual nuclear disaster, but that mistaken assumption derives from our supposed familiarity with fictional or cinematic images and emotions rather than with the real thing. The reason for the essential discrepancy between the real nuclear and the cinematic one is that “more attention . . . is given to events that occur immediately before the detonation and/or at some distance from the detonation and/or long after the detonation.” 24 In other words, in representing nuclear disaster we attend to the before and after but we forget about (or turn a blind eye to) the nowness of it, namely, what happens at the very ground zero (the epicenter of the detonation) during the moment of the explosion. Byrne specifically mentions how the film Failsafe (1964), for instance, barely scratches the surface of the horror of a nuclear holocaust: “The ‘beep’ of an ambassador’s melted phone is heard first in Moscow, then, in New York, where a sequence of familiar street scenes comes to an abrupt stop-action end.” 25 It is as if the director had suddenly stopped filming the scene out of horror and awe for the outcome, which constitutes what we call “negative presentation.” But precisely by being “realistic” but not real, such a film presents an inaccurate and moderate picture of what the real feels like, and thus provides an unethical, because untrue, picture of the nuclear reality. What is non-true, and therefore unethical, about such a representation has to do with the fact that the viewers of the film will eventually step out of the theater safe, without a single physical wound, misled into thinking that there might be a way out of real catastrophe, some form of closure or resolution, in the same way that there was a way out of the theater after the film ended! Arguably, the representation of the before and the after of disaster rules out the possibility of (illustrating) the now. But if now is lethal how can there ever be an after? For all those reasons, one can say that people today are far from familiar with nuclear disaster, especially on Western territory, since they appear to be overfamiliarized with light illustrations of it either on nonWestern ground or in fictional illustrations. Nonetheless, as we have already argued, we have to stick to the nuclear image but simultaneously

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let it be shot through with our faculty of imagination (besides, image is an unconscious projection of our imaginative powers) in order to ensure that there will be a full aesthetic engagement, better, a full bodily and mental engagement when witnessing nuclear disaster or reflecting upon the very possibility of it. In that sense, the aesthetic appreciation of the real mushroom clouds in Hiroshima or on the test grounds in Los Alamos in America and elsewhere may considerably contribute to the configuration of a more ethical stance toward nuclear warfare or the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction. The fascination that image generates in the mind is an exceptional ally in capturing the full extent of horror. Especially our fascination with beautiful yet uncanny images that are, however, morally ambivalent or, worse, inextricable from unconditional and horrific death could be used to the benefit of retaining memory of those landmark events that time should never obliterate from the official historical narrative. ZEUS AS A TERRORIST It is hard not to admit that when it comes to meditating on nuclear catastrophe, aesthetics and ethics intersect at more than one point. Judging the mushroom cloud aesthetically involves the appreciation (and even, however callous it may sound, admiration) of the “nowness” of the image. As we have argued, aesthetic judgment is a disinterested act in the sense that it demonstrates no substantial interest in the cause or the effect of the image at hand, for example, the moral dimensions of the spectacular image, but rather capitalizes on the cognitively unacknowledged but imaginatively staggering aesthesis of the image or the event per se. People are mesmerized by something they witness without being able to justify that feeling, which usually makes them go out of their way to hide or censor the individual sensation that feels forbidden to them. But whereas the sheer beauty of a single event or its imagistic representation cannot be undone or erased by its potential morally problematic consequences, can it be overshadowed or diminished by them? In a well-written essay, A. W. Eaton raises this very question but at the level of art appreciation. In reference to the widespread admiration for Titian’s famous painting Rape of Europa (Ratto di Europa, 1559–1562), Eaton holds that precisely because the painting seems to eroticize rape, rather than passively represent abduction, it is ethically flawed, which diminishes its aesthetic value as well: Consider, for instance, Europa’s revealed breast, the evocative and allusive folds of drapery between her bare and fleshy thighs, the froth of sea foaming around both figures, and so on. The painting implies that sex will soon take place, and moreover, that this sex will be of the nonconsensual and violent sort. The latter is indicated by Europa’s ex-

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tremely precarious posture; she is clearly not riding the bull but rather being savagely dragged off against her will. . . . But the painting does not simply represent rape in a neutral manner. Rather, it eroticizes Europa’s rape, and it does so along two axes: first, in terms of what it depicts, and second, by calling for certain feelings regarding what it depicts. . . . I urge instead that Titian’s intricate, vivid, and deeply sensual conjuring of this rape fantasy counts as an ethical defect. 26

Eaton talks about “rape” and the eroticization of it in Titian’s painting. Nonetheless, the work never shows any explicit signs of sexual violence unless we are willing to read into the painting the fulfillment of the wellknown myth that refers to the abduction (rather than rape) of Europa by Zeus in the shape of a bull and their arrival in Crete where she was impregnated by him. It is very interesting that Titian himself never gave his painting any name related to a rape or abduction. As far as we know, in the letters he exchanged with his patron King Philip II of Spain he either called it “Europa” or even “Europa and/on the Bull.” The term “rape” (ratto) was first employed in 1626 by the scholar/archaeologist Cassiano dal Pozzo, and it is not at all certain that it would have been accepted as an appropriate title by Titian. On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that the Renaissance painter did not inculcate in his work drops of an ambivalent sexual tension between the maiden and the bull, a tension probably springing from the fact that this wasn’t a simple case of abduction or sexual coercion since the act of violence at issue was actually committed by a God (Zeus), which would perhaps elevate single-handedly the scene to a “religious initiation” episode, let alone dignify the abduction or rape of Europa. Titian paints very skilfully on the face of Europa both terror and rapture; therefore, the painting has to be evaluated on the basis of what it depicts—physical ecstasy—rather than what it insinuates, whether that be consensual sex or cases of sexual exploitation of women in sixteenthcentury Europe. Indeed, there is eroticism and an eroticization of godly abduction, as Eaton supports. Yet, it is an eroticizing that stays within the limits of the painting, without spilling over, so to speak, to the potential consequences of such an eroticization, namely the eventual seduction of Europa, which would have been narrated or dramatized by a future painting. In other words, the painting is to be admired at for what it is, not what it means politically, morally, or socially. Its value derives from its aesthetic and formal features as well as its interpretation of Ovid’s own take on the specific scene from the Greek myth and it cannot be held accountable either for the existence of the myth or its inherent (im)morality. The beauty of the painting consists of what it illustrates and how it illustrates it in the “nowness” of the painting. What happens after the abduction is perhaps the subject of another painting; therefore, to pass judgment upon Titian’s work by relying upon its supposed perver-

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sity is to not appraise it at all for what it is. Morality turns a blind eye to intrinsic beauty. But Eaton, one may retort, never claims to look at the work from the standpoint of morality but of ethicism. If we assume that morality would denounce the underlying sexuality as well as the sexual violence implied in the painting by arguing that the work cannot possibly be seen as beautiful or compelling owing to its blatant ethical blemishes, ethicism would hold that the aesthetic value of the painting is not entirely wiped out by its unethical underpinnings, but it is certainly diminished by them. The ethicist David Hume supports the idea that “where vicious manners are described without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure [the artwork], and to be a real deformity. . . . The want of humanity and of decency, so conspicuous in the characters drawn by several of the ancient poets . . . diminishes considerably the merit of their noble performances.” 27 Hume, in essence, endorses the view that it is perfectly fine to illustrate deformity, perversion, or pure evil in artistic or other representation, as long as there is someone or something in the work to decry such deformity or perversion. The lack of such disapprobation would create the impression that the artist invites the viewer to perpetrate perverse acts similar to the ones illustrated in the artwork. But who needs an arbiter telling her what to think or feel when it comes to artistic appreciation (of ugliness)? The ethicist principle seems more insidious than the moralist one insofar as the latter, being straightforwardly against artistic representations of ugliness, takes us away from the possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of it, whereas the former provisionally grants us the right to view perversity in art, only to take that “right” back should we begin to seriously admire the autonomous beauty of artistic perversity. In simple terms, ethicism appears to patronize us by giving a beautiful painting its due, on the one hand, while trying to teach a lesson as to what the real bounds of art are, on the other. Eaton subscribes to the ethicist logic by maintaining that Titian’s painting is ethically compromised, therefore aesthetically diminished, in view of the fact that it “calls upon us to have [erotic] feelings about th[e] event [of rape].” 28 However, even if we do admit that Titian’s masterpiece is ethically tainted, we cannot seriously argue that its “formal” structure, or its texture, is not of exquisite beauty; nor can we maintain that the beauty at hand becomes problematic or diminished by the supposedly “unethical” circumstances depicted in the painting, since beauty appreciation is a radically imaginative act permeated by spontaneity and authentic emotion rather than a sustained effort to uncover the politics of art. But how can we judge the painterly representation of an infamous myth to be unethical either in its strictly moralistic sense or in its ethicist construal? And more particularly, how can we talk about Zeus as a common rapist who offends our humanitarian values, or about Titian’s art-

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work as inviting us to “have erotic feelings about rape”? Does the fact that the semi-naked Europa is being carried off by a bull appeal to our dark and twisted fantasies? In that case, shouldn’t we be talking about the perversity of sexually deviant—woman with animal—behavior as well? Perhaps even take Ovid to be a profligate pornographer? The argument that Titian provokes (intentionally or not) our sexual fantasies related to rape is untenable. For one thing, there have to already lurk inside us such fantasies of rape for the painting to provoke, in which case one would have to solve much bigger problems and resolve much more serious dilemmas than the ones posed by the specific artwork! Besides, the illustration of a mythical rape need not render the viewer sexually violent in her own private life; it is more likely that it will make her rethink the phenomenon of sexual violence or rape by problematizing it against the backdrop of the entire body of mythical and cultural stereotypes imposed by the sixteenth- as well as twenty-first-century society. Presuming that an artwork is ethically flawed indeed, it does not necessarily follow that its aesthetic value or beauty is diminished or affected in any way. On the contrary, sometimes the ethical ambivalence of an, already seen as “beautiful,” work of art adds to its beauty and aesthetic appeal by awakening our forbidden fantasies springing from that lawless and disinterested entity called “imagination.” Delacroix’s 1824 painting The Massacre at Chios, discussed in chapter two, is undoubtedly visually compelling to the extent that it accurately illustrates a genocide, a bloodbath of immeasurable proportions, and it does so in such a vivid fashion and by paying so much attention to quasi-photographic detail that it calls upon us to admire the pictorial representation of a real ethical catastrophe as well as meditate on the humanitarian aspects of the massacre itself. 29 On the one hand, Delacroix is not consciously inviting us to aesthetically appreciate genocide; he is striving only to represent accurately a gory historical fact in order to sensitize the viewer to the ethical horror of the event. On the other hand, the explicit violence depicted in the painting may be deemed to be pornographic. It is a pornography provoked by a covert fascination with the close-ups on the bleeding bodies and desperate faces of the people. There is, then, sexual and visual pornography and violence involved in both, Titian and Delacroix. If Titian is immoral, so is Delacroix. But it is precisely because of their intrinsic “immorality” that the paintings are so aesthetically appealing. The viewer is consciously drawn by the beautiful but unconsciously fascinated with it if it is morally ambivalent as well, because in the latter case her forbidden fantasies about art and the real world around her may be accommodated. The viewer of The Rape of Europa is drawn by the beautiful artistic representation at hand but also unconsciously fascinated with its covert immoral features—the depiction of Zeus/the bull as that unimaginable power sweeping a human off her feet and demonstrating his almighty forcefulness against

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which the conventional weaponry of man or woman—the human body itself—is no match. The equivalent for Zeus in the real world is the atomic bomb along with the nuclear image. We are secretly or conspicuously fascinated with the immoral uniqueness (or unique immorality) of the nuclear mushroom cloud in the same way that we are enthralled, captivated, by the immoral omnipresence of a supergod like Zeus as well as the powerful pictorial representation of him through Titian. Zeus is a terrorist who takes hostages—Europa—in order to send a message of world domination in the mythical realm; and we love him for it. HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI AS PLANES OF AESTHETIC TERROR(ISM) Unprecedented beauty, in its Kantian sense, cannot be diminished, let alone erased, by moral judgment and if forbidden aesthetics is very important in art appreciation as explained in the previous section, it is additionally so in appraising real world landmark events of the twentieth century such as the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Undoubtedly, on contemplating those very names—Hiroshima, Nagasaki— we are simultaneously repulsed as well as puzzled, appalled as well as unknowingly captivated emotionally. But one does not need to meditate on a destructive event from the outside to be able to appreciate it aesthetically. A French journalist called Robert Gullian, for instance, observed how even the Japanese themselves broke into “cries of admiration at the unholy beauty” of what they were witnessing during the totally destructive American air raid with conventional weapons against Tokyo and their major cities on March 9, 1945: The city was “illuminated like the forest of brightly lighted Christmas trees.” The bombs “descended rather slowly like a cascade of silvery water.” 30 Needless to say how incompatible to each other seem the image of a Christmas tree and that of a destructive weapon: the former stands for birth and the latter for death; still, on an aesthetic level they looked just as beautiful and pleasing to the eye. Paradoxical and quasi-masochistic though it sounds, a number of people on the ground—mainly Japanese—were actually applauding during the unprecedented incendiary attack on Tokyo that killed more than a hundred thousand people and burned the whole city to ashes: A “watching priest could write that the explosions ‘appeared translucid, unreal, light as fantastic dragonflies’ [while many] have spoken of their delight in seeing napalm ignite, of loving its ‘silent power.’” 31 On the one hand, it is obviously a defense mechanism that was activated which made those eyewitnesses behave as if they were not themselves participants in the very same theater of destruction they were commenting upon. On the other hand, the fantasized distance from the attack rendered them ca-

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pable, at least for an instant, of freely acknowledging the aesthetic power of the images and sounds produced by the enemy’s war machines. The twentieth century elevated airplanes (especially the war plane) to the sphere of art and aesthetic beauty. Therefore, images of them during a surprise raid with conventional weapons might indeed titillate and intrigue spectators. Would the image or impact of non-conventional bombing—atomic bombing—raise the stakes for beauty appreciation by exerting an even more inexplicably fascinating influence upon those witnessing the forcefulness of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It was ironically the American authorities that would call for a serious appraisal of the grandeur of the nuclear bomb by means of appreciating, both aesthetically and intellectually, the deadly forcefulness of a nuclear event. Initially, one of the nuclear targets was the cultural city of Kyoto. General Groves thought that Kyoto was a fitting target because it was large and therefore one could draw safe conclusions as to the real effects of the bomb. In addition, the Target Committee focused on Kyoto because its citizens were allegedly “more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.” 32 In other words, the Committee grants the people of Kyoto the “right” to taste firsthand the uncanny experience of being bombed with nuclear weapons on the grounds that, because their natural environment is culture sensitive and so full of historical monuments from their recent and distant past, they are sophisticated enough to comprehend both emotionally and intellectually the full scale of a nuclear attack. Thus, “[if] the highly intelligent people of Kyoto survived from the nuclear blast, the committee presumably expected them to tell the rest of the world how deadly the bomb was!” 33 Extraordinary but somehow true: The bomb should not just wreak havoc but also have witnesses attesting to the fact that it wreaks havoc. The bomb, that is, is not only nuclear but theatrical and aesthetic as well. Being theatrical and aesthetic, the sophisticated nuclear bomb is apparently destined for intelligent persons rather than idiots who can only feel the magnitude of its force with their senses without being able to grasp catastrophe intellectually, or who can feel but cannot understand where that feeling comes from. According to the committee, then, activating all five senses is seminal in grasping emotionally and psychologically the grandeur of the nuclear blast, but this act is worthless unless it is accompanied by a mental and intellectual comprehension of the event and the feeling encompassing it. This amounts to saying that only “clever” and highly “civilized” people can appreciate the aesthetic and ethical dimension of a clever bomb like the nuclear one. The committee’s basic argument appears unknowingly to resonate with (neo) Kantian overtones of what constitutes a beautiful experience, or rather, an experience of the beautiful. 34 For Kant, when there is a consensus between concept and image, or between reason (or intellect)

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and feeling, a sense of beauty is evoked. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant implies that whereas image is not fully congruent with a concept (since an idea cannot be given in concreto), in case of a momentary harmonization between the two—when reason comprehends, thus contains, feeling—pleasure is created and a figure of something beautiful turns up as a result. In the previous chapter, we argued that such a kind of harmonization was at stake during the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the gap between terrorist conception and terrorist implementation/realization was bridged, and as a consequence, some sort of “terrorist beauty” (or beauty through terror[ism]) was configured. 35 By analogy, the Target Committee probably aspired to provoke a similar emotion. It asked future sufferers to see the beauty (!) of the bomb by uniting within themselves the faculty of intellect and the faculty of aesthesis; or even manage a free play between their imagination and their reasoning from which, if we are to believe Kant, a feeling of pleasure would spring. Conceptualizing the “beautiful” destructiveness of the nuclear blast would allegedly convert Kyoto sufferers into actual messengers of death, trustworthy eyewitnesses spreading the word of the imminent annihilation of Japan, unless the Japanese somehow came to their senses and persuaded their government to surrender. This is beauty and aesthetics at the service of war. Kant thought that only through the union of the senses with the intellect can knowledge arise, since the senses, by themselves, cannot think of anything and the intellect, by itself, can feel or intuit nothing. Therefore, Kyoto residents can gain knowledge of this terrifying new weapon (and also derive pleasure from that knowledge) only by combining their senses with their reasoning, or, their aesthetic abilities with the power of the intellect to rationalize what the senses are at a loss to account for. Such a playful combination resembles what some aestheticians have called a synaesthetic experience—the ultimate aesthetic experience. In his essay “Aesthetic Cognition,” Robert S. Root-Bernstein maintains that synaesthesia is a situation during which “all of the senses are intermingled to create a complete mind-body experience.” But as he also adds: Beyond the experiential aspects of aesthetics . . . most philosophers and practitioners also argue that a complete aesthetic experience must combine sensation, craft, and understanding. Thus, a great piece of music or science should not only move us, but also impress us with its use of the tools of the trade and surprise us with new understanding. I have called this combination of sense and sensibility synosia, from an elision of the words synaesthesis (to combine senses) and gnosis (to know). The best science, like the best art, is that which appeals to the widest range of emotion and intellect. 36

Bernstein’s insight about a “synotic” stance that would combine sensibility and knowledge is concerned with how scientific knowledge is pro-

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duced, and particularly with the role of beauty in making logical deductions. In the same way that we judge an object to be beautiful if it meets the subjective criteria or expectations related to archetypical pictures within our imagination, the scientist values scientific results as more reliable when they appeal to her aesthetic criteria as well as intuitive capacity: “Intuition is one of the reasons that scientists value elegance so highly. Elegant results are like poems. . . . Science, being a human endeavor, requires [insight, connections, surprises and joy]” to render its mission “more interesting and fun.” 37 Synotic or synaesthetic, the population of Kyoto, in the Target Committee’s outrageously aestheticized view, would be called upon to employ both aesthesis and intellect to disseminate the news about the devilish nature of the nuclear apocalypse. The reason why Kyoto was finally spared was directly related to the realization that the cultural center of Japan had to be preserved eventually, if there was any chance of Americans and Japanese becoming allies after the war. Evidently, such cultural and aesthetic preoccupations should not be a real issue when it comes to bombing actual human beings but they do inform political agendas maintaining a humanitarian face in a time of war atrocity. The question of beauty, therefore, is inextricable from the ethics of the question of how to remain humane or, at least, retain the façade of humanity while committing acts of absolute terror. However, preserving the historical legacy of Japan by means of keeping intact its cultural relics serves to aestheticize the pain and terror felt by the victims of nuclear catastrophe as well as intensify the fear that attending to the aesthetically appealing or culturally meaningful does not necessarily involve attending to the human. To represent the unthinkable horror of nuclear disaster would require much more than the positivism of scientific discourse, which is predicated upon reason or logical argumentation. Nor can historical narration fully yield a truthful account of nuclear atrocity insofar as it draws upon the very positivism and “objectivism” of science. It takes a “synotic” (synaesthetic and simultaneously cognitive) plunge into the world of apocalyptic imagery to capture what really happened in Hiroshima, because the unimaginable can only be done justice to by precisely resorting to human imagination and the realm of poetic discourse. Even science itself, as explained earlier, frequently resorts to non-scientific but rather poetic and utterly imaginative statements to account for its potentially spectacular and fascinating scientific results. If that is the case, one can imagine how poetic scientific information can get when it comes to describing images of nuclear destruction. Spencer Weart, indeed, points out how information on nuclear energy “rarely comes all by itself. . . ; it usually comes as one ingredient in a mixture of ideas, feelings and images. 38 In any case, an aesthetic appreciation of horrific imagery is involved in the process of trying to understand what occurred in Hiroshima; that is, looking at the image and interacting with it emotionally as

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well as psychologically to such an extent that one might turn complicit in perpetrating the act itself. Aesthetic appreciation makes sure that the senses take over from the individual’s intellectual capacities which have the tendency to normalize or rationalize atrocity: “On seeing a photograph of (what used to be) Hiroshima, even people whom nobody could blame for the destruction might feel a gnawing anxiety not unlike guilt”; the public “was stunned by photographs and newsreels that swept across square miles of burntout wasteland. . . . [I]t was atomic force that caught the imagination.” 39 Taking a good look at Hiroshima photographic representations entailed repressing reason and privileging imagination: “A few observers remarked that mythical thinking was overpowering rational discussion, but even they barely glimpsed all the symbolism at work.” 40 Disturbing poems were written in the aftermath of the bombing, likening Man to a tyrant who tears mother earth’s womb to know how he was conceived, while many people unknowingly employed familiar mythical themes to explain what had happened in Hiroshima, since logical formulations and sheer journalistic accounts of the event would not suffice. If it is correct to argue that our logical formulations are but a shadow of what we have actually imagined, then it would not be paradoxical to say that we are going to have to activate our full imaginative, rather than reasoning, powers if our intention is to provide an objective account or representation of the Hiroshima disaster. 41 At this point we are delving into a negative aesthetic experience of destruction via the empowerment of the senses, but what is also implicit in such a negative experience is the possibility of a disinterested, hence, in a way, positive aesthetic experience of the terrifyingly “beautiful” when it comes to contemplating graphic representations of nuclear disaster and its after-effects. Such a positive aesthetic experience has frequently been registered, for instance, as the “terrible beauty” of atomic explosion, which indicates that an unhindered aesthetic appreciation of the immoral, still, visually captivating is gradually beginning to be acknowledged in contemporary discussions concerning violence and terrorism. 42 The first ever nuclear detonation on enemy ground materialized the harmonization between concept and imagination. The concept of “absolute disaster” associated with mythical patterns and apocalyptic, but remote from contemporary human experience, scenarios about doomsday found its perfect example in terms of imagination—Hiroshima. As deftly put, “[t]he archaic symbols of nuclear legends resonate with universal anxieties and hopes.” 43 In other terms, the nuclear bombing and its visual aspects were the “perfect” match for preexisting human concerns with the potential destruction of the human species in the distant future. It was precisely that harmonizing process that brought (eye)witnesses to an empathic state of bodily and mental identification with those who suffered or were still suffering through an inconceivable disaster. Therefore,

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it was via the aesthetic realm and the visual element rather than rational frameworks that the nuclear horror was captured. One had to feel the disaster by engaging emotionally with, and aesthetically appreciating, the excruciating images at hand so that the memory of the atrocious act would not eclipse and history would hopefully never repeat itself. Just like beauty which, according to Elaine Scarry, carries the ethical function of humbling the ego by decentering it (see my introduction), witnessing ugliness and horror is capable of ethically bringing the subject to her knees by disrupting egotistic and laidback patterns of behavior as well as by undermining the feeling of security and insouciance that prevailed in Western societies in the second half of the twentieth century. Aesthetics and imagination overpower rational thinking and logic. The aesthetic power of the bomb was unquestionable for the American authorities who relied immensely upon its spectacularly theatrical dimensions to finally crush the morale of a nation that seemed, up until then, almost unable to surrender. In fact, the Americans felt that it would nearly take a set of Hollywood-like images and effects of terror to force the Japanese to submit to the Allies. This means that the enemy would have to be terrified and terrorized into submission, rather than actually killed. In this light, the nuclear bomb would operate as a terrorist machine, not one that would aim at physically annihilating Japanese civilians and the military: “They hoped the tremendous spectacle of flash and blast would bring the Japanese to their senses. The first atomic bombings would be an act of rhetoric, a science fiction image aimed less at the enemy’s cities than at his mind.” 44 Indeed, science fiction images were often invoked by Japanese victims of the bomb. Miyoko Matsubara, a Hiroshima survivor and an eyewitness to the destruction, recounts that many other survivors “looked like characters out of horror movies with their skin and flesh horribly burned.” 45 We are already at the level of aesthetic coercion, rather than absolute physical incapacitation, where the stimulation of the senses merges dramatically with their numbing. The Hiroshima bomb would not kill so much as send a message about the palpable dimensions of nuclear lethality. The bomb would first shock its targeted audience (as well as ignite fear in other future rivals like the Soviet Union), before it actually killed them. The purpose of that bomb, then, was profoundly rhetorical (by aiming at persuasion), theatrical (by putting on a show with special effects), and ultimately aesthetic insofar as the audience/spectators were made to comprehend with their feelings and their imagination (as well as with their very own bodily pain) what their fate would be, unless they surrendered. The aesthetic dimension of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was inextricably intertwined with their terrorizing aim. The two detonations were, as argued previously, terrorist acts par excellence in the sense that they were used without any warning against civilians and noncombatants rather than military targets. Furthermore, they were in-

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stant attacks on cities that happened to have very large populations, thereby maximizing the shockingly lethal effect of the bombs. Kanji Yamasaki, another survivor, narrates how immediately after the blast and the flash, ten or twelve small animals looking like “monkeys” stirred right beside him. The monkeys turned out to be human beings barely alive with their “guts hanging out” and their tongues “dangling.” 46 Even for a survivor already in great physical pain such dehumanizing images of horror were too much to bear. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, in support of the terrorist nature of the bombs, explained that the two bombs—the only ones at America’s disposal at the time—“stun[ned] the enemy into surrender,” adding, however, that it was the second bomb, the one exploding over Nagasaki, that should be characterized as a terror bomb insofar as it “suggested a willingness to use the weapon without compunction” and thus “it was not in any sense a ‘demonstration’, since a demonstration had already been made.” 47 Schelling is here making the claim that a “demonstration bomb” such as the uranium nuclear explosion in Hiroshima does not qualify as a weapon of terror, unlike the Nagasaki plutonium bomb which went, appallingly, far beyond demonstration. In one sense, he is right. After all, Hiroshima came first while Nagasaki second. In the former case the inhabitants were desperately trying to make sense of something inconceivable, unprecedented, and incomparable to whatever they knew up until then—they literally did not know what hit them—and as a result, they did not have sufficient time to feel, strictly speaking, “terrorized” simply because they were striving to process the inflow of all the new information that came, in such a raw manner, through their senses. In the latter case (Nagasaki), at least according to Schelling, the people became appalled beyond compare as they already had an idea of what was happening to them—they were starting to “get the picture,” so to speak—since they knew of what had occurred in Hiroshima, and therefore, they were fully capable of conceptualizing their own predicament. Schelling may have a point. Still, if we take the aesthetic ramifications of the nuclear weapon into consideration, we might argue that both bombings were demonstrations of an unknown force destined to annihilate big portions of the population as well as terrorize their government into submission. Especially Nagasaki, as a repetition of the original hit, gave the impression that it would never really be over, Hiroshima was not unique, more attacks were under way, which naturally strengthened the feeling of despair in the victims’ souls and of absolute weakness in their leaders’ minds. The inherently theatrical power of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki hits derives from the will to demonstrate to the interested parts (both allies and enemies) the new capacity to literally create hell on earth through the use of innovative, unheard-of technologies that would elevate the human to the sphere of the superhuman. More particularly, the purpose of the demonstration was “the strategic domination of the post-

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war configuration” for the sake of which a “quantum leap of a weapon without limits” was necessary. “Even in the context of a terrible war, this was terror, a genocidal atrocity.” 48 Admittedly, the role of aesthetics is crucial for capturing the full extent of a terrorist incident or genocidal act. The problem lies in that the possibility of aesthetic admiration of, and fascination with, such an event and its representations may easily creep into the allegedly dispassionate act of bearing witness or the effort to comprehend atrocity through aesthesis. The forbidden aesthetics I focus on in this study is directly related to the widely unacknowledged subjective experience of the beautiful before spectacular images of unprecedented terrorist catastrophe. I have already dwelled on how, both before and after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear disasters, images of the bomb and the resulting mushroom cloud were treated by the West with not just awe but exhilaration. Thus, in the same way that the Los Alamos scientists had responded with enthusiasm to the aesthetic aspects of the first bomb test in July 1945, other scientists and military officers would nearly aestheticize the view of a 1951 nuclear detonation in the Pacific, whose codename was “Operation Greenhouse.” The extravagant picture where a number of officers are seated one in front the other as if in a movie theater, wearing a special kind of goggles which is supposed to protect them from radiation and the atomic flashlight, looks rather naïve today. However, it also shows the extent to which a willful eyewitness to an atomic detonation becomes mesmerized by the eerie image ensuing from the explosion. In the case at hand, the goggles may be likened to today’s 3-D movie glasses, thereby reinforcing the aesthetic dimension of the situation: dispassionate onlookers indulging in the unique experience of what could be hell on earth, getting a glimpse of something which is almost without precedent and resembles the experience of the beautiful or even the artistic. On second thought, one might claim that the scientists and journalists watching the atomic spectacle and overseeing the whole “Operation Greenhouse” procedure may only be ostensibly dispassionate. On the contrary, it is likely that they are thrilled to participate in the spectacular event—to them, probably a beautiful image in itself—without taking into consideration that this is a weapon of mass destruction (I am not considering here the possibility that their potential fascination is owing precisely to the destructiveness of the weapon). Of course the moral thing to do would be to feel horrified by the bomb’s atrocious potentials and, as a result, refuse to bear witness to it by looking the other way. However, one should not forget that these are people that unconsciously associate the effectiveness of the bomb with its aesthetic impact upon themselves: the more impressive the impact, the more successful the experiment; the more overwhelming the experience, the more destructive the nuclear weapon. 49

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Supposing that the spectators of the “Operation Greenhouse” are not in any way aesthetically involved but rather physically and emotionally distanced from what they are looking at, does that make them innocent viewers? No, it does not, according to Kyo Maclear, who holds that looking “has never been so casually dangerous,” adding that such a photograph, despite illustrating passive eyewitnesses, actually “has the power to remind us that all casual forms of looking may involve complicity.” 50 The audience, therefore, is complicit in the whole operation by means of simply attesting visually to the extraordinary and strangely appealing lethality of the atomic bomb. The ostensibly distanced act of aesthetic (which is at the same time professional and scientific) appraisal results in the, far from distanced, involvement in carrying out a highly successful operation. If objective onlookers who, technically speaking, are not directly involved in the production of a spectacle of horror should be seen as accomplices to past and future atrocities and thereby need to be scolded or denounced for appreciating aesthetically something that is not supposed to be “aesthetic,” what can be said of those who were evidently implicated in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki operations? Are they entitled to having an aesthetic attitude too, at the very minute that they are making the final preparations for the nuclear hit? In a documentary on the atomic disaster called Ground Zero (1995), Charles Sweeney, crew member aboard the Enola Gay—the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945—provides a personal account of that historical moment: We could see the city just lying there like it looked in the pictures. A beautiful military target. We picked as close to the geographical center of the population area as we could. . . . And I saw the bomb leave his airplane. I did say to myself, “Gee, there it goes. It’s a live one. It’s the first live one I’ve ever seen. And there aren’t any strings on it. We can’t pull it back.” 51

To begin with, this description shoots down the argument that it was a military target that the crew was aiming at, as it appears that they could not have picked closer to the population area than they did. The specific choice was therefore related to the demonstrative and intrinsically terrorist purposes of the attack. Nonetheless, the part of the account that definitely strikes the listener as irrelevant, unexpected, and callous is the description of the city as a “beautiful” target. How can beauty be put in the same context as utter nuclear destruction? And ultimately what does aesthetics as disinterested appreciation have to do with the Hiroshima horror, where there should only be room for a debate over the inhumanity or, at best, the strategic/political necessity of the strike? We cannot seriously argue that the members of the crew were enjoying their mission so much as to call their aim a “beautiful” one. Sweeney is not a monster to find beauty in mass destruction. It is precisely because

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he dissociates the aerial view of Hiroshima from the true mission of the plane (nuclear destruction) that he can bring up matters of aesthetic appreciation: Hiroshima is beautiful from above and this conclusion, paradoxically, cannot be changed by its subsequent erasure from the map. The co-existence of aesthetic judgment and the (un)ethics of nuclear warfare in Sweeney’s mind is facilitated by the crew’s physical remoteness from the city to be annihilated, which unconsciously takes the real inhabitants of Hiroshima out of the equation. The actual people of the city, in their pure physicality and materiality, are not that important since they cannot be seen with the naked eye. In fact, the entire operation may look unreal to those participating in it. It is not a coincidence that Sweeney seems to realize the criticality of the situation only after the bomb is released, as though the bomb were, up until that point, just a toy to play with: “It’s a live one. It’s the first live one I’ve even seen,” he confesses, which implies that the bombs he had witnessed in the past were dead objects, fictional and harmless entities to be easily “pulled back” from the strings attached to them. The unreal (or surreal) dimension of the Enola Gay’s mission, alongside the relative safety of the mission—the crew were expected to go back home as this was no suicide mission—provided some space for reflection and meditation on the aesthetics of the view over Hiroshima. Sweeney is capable of deriving beauty from what would soon be a theater of horrendous violence because he unknowingly adopts a disinterested stance to the scene at hand. To employ Kantian terms, his judgment is reflective or aesthetic rather than determinant or moral, insofar as he concentrates upon the sheer nowness of the view rather than the before or the after of the scene—namely, the moral imperative of the mission and the consequences of it, respectively. Aesthetic/reflective judgment hinges upon the question of Kantian beauty: an object of delight which is independent of any interest or a priori rule. The beautiful is not a matter of pre-established rules but of spontaneous and immediate individual reaction, therefore it appears to be interest-free, namely, free from conventional morality or moral judgment of any kind. 52 Sweeney’s immediate and spontaneous reaction to the view of Hiroshima from above by no means relies upon any prescribed moral rule—the typically “moral” reaction would be to preclude (at least publicly) any aesthetic judgment that touches upon the “beauty” of a city to be subsequently bombarded. On the contrary, he seems to remain, at least for a split second, focused upon the sheer, uncontextualized image of the beautiful or aesthetically appealing, regardless of the fate of the object connected with the image at hand. This is an independent attitude that abstains from making moral judgments about, say, the supposed good or evil nature of the enemy (the Japanese), which would drive mistakenly someone to think that maybe beauty can only be found on friendly and “innocent,” rather than “impure,” territory.

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A disinterested stance is, as we have already established, unhindered by preconditions or a priori rules that determine what can be experienced as “beautiful” and what cannot. Disinterestedness and reflective/aesthetic judgment make us think about the unique circumstances by differentiating between moral law and ethical justice. 53 In a press release issued by the War Department in the aftermath of the second nuclear attack on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, William Laurence, science writer for the New York Times and special consultant to the Manhattan Engineer District, adopts what would certainly be seen as an “immoral” attitude by exalting the bomb—the assemblage of which he had witnessed with his own eyes two days earlier—as “a thing of beauty to behold.” 54 How can a weapon of mass destruction be a thing of beauty? That is a legitimate question. On the other hand, a disinterested view cannot turn a blind eye to the visual compulsion exercised by the pure form of a stateof-the-art technological achievement, despite its future use as a lethal weapon. Laurence’s attitude is disinterested insofar as it is not mediated by the urgent political and moral implications of assembling the bomb (and having also to use it) but rather attends to a mere image in its aesthetic wholeness. A morality-driven attitude would provide a skewed perspective of an object under appreciation, in the sense that the type of morality at issue— moralism—generates prejudice or inhibition (what Kant names “interest”) that ends up blurring the subject’s view and directing her attention toward issues surrounding the object of beauty rather than concentrating specifically upon the object as such. Such an “interested” attitude, however, hardly qualifies as an ethical one—if we are to espouse the meaning assigned to “ethical behaviour” in this study—insofar as it considers an aesthetic object, or object of beauty, through the perspective of determinant judgment: “if it kills, it is not beautiful.” Through this lens, Lawrence’s aesthetic remark is, strictly speaking, immoral but at the same time ethical, as it allows for the possibility of a forbidden, because morally unacceptable, beauty entering the gruesome reality of mass destruction. It is ethical because it tacitly accepts the view that nuclear history and politics do not preclude aesthetics in terms of an appreciation of the beautiful. Moreover, it is ethical and just as it reflects the freedom of the individual to acknowledge the importance of non-cognitive but of fully imaginative faculties in the appraisal of manmade or natural catastrophes. Far from being deemed insensitive, Lawrence’s comment arising from within the War Department’s press statement should rather be taken as an unconscious symptom of uninhibited disinterestedness or “indifference” toward the moral implications of the existence of an object, in our case, the existence of the atomic bomb. The radical freedom implicit in the subjective appraisal of the bomb as a beautiful object cannot be disengaged from the idea that in the case of the beautiful “the feeling [is] pure,

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formal, and utterly ‘indifferent’ toward the existence of the object” per se. 55 Especially in the judgment of taste, “what matters is not the existence of the object but only what we are left free to do with its mere representation within ourselves,” 56 that is, the mere image of the bomb as an aesthetic object which also happens to be “the most concentrated intellectual effort in history.” 57 The autonomy of taste, as Kant has held, is independent of the existence of the object in which we take pleasure, and has nothing whatsoever to do with any practical interest—arguably including moral prejudice, political motivation, or personal inhibition— and, hence, such an autonomy is disinterested. 58 STUNNING IMAGE AND THE JAPANESE MEMORY OF HORROR Image as representation and aesthetic sensibility as the appreciation of the beautiful are inextricably interconnected. One has to be able to see, to witness, in order to appreciate a painting, a beautiful sunrise, or even an appalling but visually captivating event on the TV. At the same time, one may also find great ethical value in appreciating an image or witnessing the pictorial, photographic, or TV representation of an event, since image helps retain historical memory, such as the memory of war atrocity or terrorist catastrophe. Following this line of thinking, we draw the conclusion that if image is ethical, then, a “beautiful” image is ethical too. Critics have emphasized the significance of sight and the image in representing the nuclear holocaust and preserving for future generations the memory of the wretchedness and horror of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki residents as well as the knowledge derived from such an appalling event. John Berger, an art critic, discussed a series of drawings by hibakusha—the name given to survivors of nuclear apocalypse—and made the case that “the memory of these events should be continually before our eyes. This is why the thousand citizens of Hiroshima started to draw on their little scraps of paper. . . . These terrible images can now release an energy for opposing evil and for the life-long struggle for that opposition.” 59 Berger insists that the two atomic attacks and their aftermath have long been deprived of their original context or meaning as they have been normalized through commonplace references to the two names (“Hiroshima”, “Nagasaki”) as well as through abstract commentary on the practical or theoretical benefits from the use of the bomb—related to the argument that the bomb allegedly ended the war. In addition, the two attacks were normalized in public consciousness via the spectacular and innocentlooking image of the mushroom cloud which, during the second half of the twentieth century, helped repress, in its beautiful shape, everything that was never meant to be forgotten: the image and the sensation of excruciating pain and loss.

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For Kyo Maclear, the repression and forgetting of the atrocity started in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear detonation, on August 20, 1945, when on the cover of Life Magazine there appeared a military photograph taken from the cockpit of the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima: This bird’s-eye view excluded even the city below, focusing instead on the spectacle of the mushroom cloud, its expanding mass of smoke distorting a still sky. The still-frame image . . . was undeniably memorable. . . . Yet, with no sign of human presence, the mushroom-cloud image seemed to support a technocratic vision. . . . Detached from flesh and context, the mushroom cloud could be seen by some as the culmination of scientific progress. 60

What both Maclear and Berger mean is that by aestheticizing the mushroom cloud we, in essence, took it out of its true context which involved, among other gory details, the falling out of real human flesh and the butchering or evaporation of real human bodies—those images and memories were too deeply repressed. Such an act of de-contextualization entailed also the retroactive “humanization” or rationalization of the whole nuclear enterprise through justification narratives and scientific reports that ended up covering up the human factor and understating the inhumanity behind the atomic bomb. Paradoxically, to re-contextualize the bomb and its images is to present them in the raw, without any rationalistic embellishments or explanatory accounts. As Berger implies, we need to divest the images of their political and military frames and exclaim at last, “this is how it really was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Activating, that is, our sensory perceptions and directing them toward the sheer image without allowing them to be mediated by any historical, political or philosophical context might lead us to the “thing itself,” the true meaning of dehumanization and catastrophe. We have already referred to Heidegger’s insight that image, as a product or symptom of imagination, is pre-conceptual as it belongs to the language of dream and fantasy—unlike rational and positivist discourse. 61 By presenting the nuclear image in the raw, we are actually entrusting imagination with the responsibility of bearing witness and doing justice to ineffable trauma. To activate imagination is to enter the realm of feeling and sensibility, or what we call the aesthetic. The latter feeds upon image, it engages with it, and this interconnection turns out to be political and ethical to the core insofar as it discloses unknown dimensions or aspects of an event that might have remained unacknowledged under the sway of human language and rationalistic discourse. Bracha Ettinger is reluctant to credit image and witnessing with the ability of doing full justice to the history of human terror and violence, yet, she concedes them the power of creating an ethical space for a “traumatic Thing-Event” using aesthetic means: “Witnessing the traumatic ThingEvent cannot give a proper witnessing concerning the event, but it attests

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to its uniqueness and validity, creating a space for it in the world by aesthetic means that becomes of ethical value.” 62 In other words, it is better to represent inaccurately than not at all. In that sense, even an inaccurate aesthetic representation of the traumatic event constitutes an ethical act. Unless we dwell on the “original” visual experience of the nuclear catastrophe through film footage, documentaries, photographs, and other related material we will not be capable of better positioning ourselves in relation to physical and ethical atrocity. On the other hand, to try and explicate the inexplicable by analyzing the atrocity through words or rationalistic accounts (or, worse, not to represent it at all) is to risk rationalizing it in the eyes of the generations to come, which might lead to the repetition of the disaster in the future or the forgetting it. The assumptions that image is the symptom of imagination and that rational discourse is the product of concept and cognition offer us the opportunity to realize that if we prioritize the aesthetic functions of imagination over the cognitive and epistemological processes of the mind, we will probably be able to grasp the full scale of the tragedy of the hibakusha by identifying or empathizing with them. The image of horror “can be both sobering and comforting: cold compress on the brow of grief. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, images of atomic-bomb destruction represent a line of defense against the force of oblivion. . . . The image is a barrier against the very loss of human existence.” 63 Now, the fact that younger generations did not have to go through those excruciating ordeals, and probably were never exposed to any actual nuclear catastrophe themselves, might lead them to unconsciously (or not) aestheticize the atomic spectacle. Such an aestheticizing act works, as we have said, under the assumption that the viewer is physically distant from the horrific view that she is looking at, and therefore she can freely and safely appreciate it on an aesthetic level. Nonetheless, a distanced or disinterested position does not necessarily result in the formation of an unethical or irresponsible attitude toward violence and its representations. On the contrary, even if we are stunned by the powerfulness of a genocidal image, indeed if we find ourselves to be fascinated not just by the random representations of horror but also by the horror itself, we are simultaneously allowing some space for the work of memory and reflection, which are indispensable for forming responsible attitudes toward the problem of generalized violence, war, as well as terrorism. Image and memory depend upon each other. What is more, the loss of the former brings about the loss or falsification of the latter. Susan Sontag has this in mind when she argues that “[h]eartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.” 64 For her, images of violence help humanity get over its sense of helplessness before catastrophe and regain trust in a positive treatment of reality. Through this lens, renouncing the terrible image as callous and heartless just because it portrays violence conduces to a grad-

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ual loss of the memory and the history to which that image was attached in the first place. But an image of violence can by no means be called callous or insensitive, unless it, by itself, conferred somehow a reality of violence. On the other hand, it is paradoxically “amnesia” emanating from the loss or dismissal of the image that, according to Sontag, leads to insensitivity and heartlessness: If you stop witnessing, then you will probably be left with only vague memories of your human, or rather humane, roots. Attending to the aesthetics of the image, translated as “aesthetically appreciating it in a disinterested fashion,” may render humans more emotionally and ethically involved when dealing with phenomena of extreme violence We have already discussed how the image emerges as the “native language of anxiety.” 65 Cathy Caruth links anxiety with trauma by addressing image as what we see or witness when we do not actually understand something through traditional means of comprehension. When we are traumatized, we are possessed by an image that could not be processed, worked through or explained when the trauma first occurred. 66 The experience or trauma of atomic detonation and its aftermath cannot be put into words when it first takes place, so the mind resorts to imagistic/iconic frameworks and translates the unprecedented experience into a series of fantasies, hallucinations and other images that keep coming back to the person that has been traumatized. Those images or fantasies, given that they belong to the realm of imagination and the unconscious, take up the task of bearing witness to the ineffable reality of atomic destruction. After all, an unthinkable disaster of that magnitude could perhaps be represented accurately through just as unthinkable images rather than through ordinary language or epistemological frameworks. By “unthinkable image” here we mean the unexpected, new and, for that reason, fascinating or even beautiful image of nuclear terrorism. Beauty has played an unnaturally dominant role in fictional or real eyewitness accounts of the nuclear apocalypse. Astonishingly, post-war Japanese authors have occasionally flirted with the idea that the atomic blast has not only brought about the utter destruction of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki societies but has simultaneously caused the regeneration of the Japanese soul. A work entitled The Bells of Nagasaki, written by Takashi Nagai and published in 1949, was meant to inspire the hibakusha themselves by extolling the redemptive dimension of the bomb. Nagai talks enthusiastically about the “noble” nature of August 9 in Nagasaki, when flames dispelled the darkness of atrocity by bringing light and peace of mind. He characteristically uses the term “beautiful” and “sublime” to do justice to the exquisite spectacle of the nuclear blast that led thousands of people to eternal life through sacrifice: “In the very depth of our grief we reverently saw here something beautiful, something pure, something sublime. Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life.” 67 The religious or,

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more specifically, Christian connotations are here more than obvious. Nagai famously rejected indigenous religious practices and espoused the Western Christian tradition. In fact, Nagai believed that the nuclear explosion was a blessing in disguise, erasing centuries of pagan traditions and inaugurating an era of spiritual transformation and enlightenment! Hence, the aesthetics of beauty in his narrative is bound up with the image of an ethical epiphany. The most popular hibakusha narrative which took imagination directly back to its etymological root—image—is Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain (1966), a novel that fuses the beauty of everyday life before the bomb and the horror of nuclear destruction by, for instance, comparing melting corpses to the natural beauty of tulips. Ibuse shifts away from Nagai’s spiritual and religious peregrinations and focuses instead on associative and poetic images that defamiliarize nuclear horror by interspersing it with lighter and playful scenes verging often on the perverse. A prominent example is the main character’s astonishment at the sight of a shop mannequin which he soon realizes to be an actual standing human body totally burned by the flash (the pika). 68 The rigidity of a body that is empty of life is also something that the author comments upon by bringing up the image of Pinocchio—a symbol of childhood innocence and, still, one that imitates a soulless entity—thus illustrating the reduction of humans to sheer dehumanized caricatures or objects once the life-giving strings are cut: “The poor plaything of wood and metal pins was supposed to have felt pain in his own wooden limbs . . . what of the dead who had once been human beings?” 69 Ibuse shows no compunction in employing poetic imagery to display the aesthetics of nuclear horror as well as the possibility of beauty in the face of it. THE POST-AESTHETIC AND THE ARTISTIC IN THE NUCLEAR REALITY Regardless of its unexpectedness or intrinsic attractiveness, the idea that image can really tell a historically accurate story, for instance, that it can truly do justice to the apocalypse in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was widely contested by philosophers and theorists espousing a poststructuralist and postmodern perspective toward the representation of history. Poststructuralism advocated that history has always been socially constructed and mediated by the domineering presence of language, therefore there is not just one version of history but many more, while the postmodern take on history concentrated upon the sublime unpresentability of a historical disaster, according to which human language is too flawed and reductive to even begin to reflect, in a just mode, such major manmade catastrophes as the extermination of millions of Jews in Nazi concentration camps and the nuclear detonations over non-military targets in Japan. In short, histo-

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ry is always other than what we say it is; the “real thing” is inaccessible to us. Derrida notoriously tried to deconstruct the so-called “metaphysics of presence” by showing how presence and absence, far from being opposites, are actually symbiotic in the sense that presence, as soon as it is invoked or called forth, turns into absence. This means that once we attempt to present, via images or language, any historical event, we will inevitably misrepresent it—thereby, the truthfulness surrounding the event will immediately disappear, it will become absent. 70 Jean Francois Lyotard focused on how memory allegedly stops when history begins; and conversely, how history stops where memory takes over. For him, we have to dismiss as ingenuous the idea that historical memory or narrativization provides any reliable hint toward a full reconstitution of the past. 71 Giorgio Agamben, following Lyotard, argues that to be able to do justice to horror one has to have experienced that horror first hand, and consequently . . . died because of it. Thus, the only reliable witnesses to the atrocity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, paradoxically, the dead, as they are the only ones that have experienced the full extent of the annihilation of life in a way that the survivors haven’t. 72 So, the poststructuralist question revolved around the impossibility of witnessing—since how can the dead speak?—as well as the irreducibility of terrible disaster or attack to a mere, aestheticizable, image of horror. The answer lay in negative presentation, which amounted to not presenting at all rather than risking understating or undermining the importance of the Event itself through simplistic representations. In this light, contemporary Japanese reactions of near-indifference toward the 1945 nuclear attacks should not sound too irrational. Post-war generations in Japan, as well as hibakusha themselves, always had an overpowering sense of nuclear destruction as something far surpassing their cognitive and imaginative faculties, feeling incapable of explicitly dealing with what had really happened in their country. 73 Nishioka Yuka, a Japanese manga artist who is not even a hibakusha or descendant of one, found it extremely hard to deal with the past, as “my fingers would simply freeze. How can one convey the cries of people thrown into this hell and stench of death, which are ‘beyond imagination’ and ‘impossible to express with words’?” 74 Nevertheless, such an attitude of negativity is in no way symptomatic of the entire manga subculture. On the contrary, it is precisely through subculture—manga, animation, science fiction, and so on, in short, through what the Japanese call otaku—that the memory of the bomb was “subjected to serious discourse among the Japanese public” and “historical amnesia” was resisted. 75 For example, the award-winning Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Yuunagi no machi, sakura no kuni), a 2004 Japanese manga created by Fumiyo Kouno, exemplifies the genre’s impact on the formation of historical consciousness as well as its decisive role in preserving memories of the atomic holocaust via its

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visual ingenuity and its freedom from the rationalism and realism of other visual media such as documentaries or photography. 76 Undoubtedly, to convey through narrative or images the excruciating terror and pain felt by the people thrown into the atomic hell is an infinitely challenging task: But this is exactly why one should pursue it. And if postmodern anti-aestheticism argues against the representability of atrocity, an ethically and politically responsible attitude requires that we keep on working on the task of remembrance by faithfully clinging to the archival material at our disposal. If words can’t express the atrocity, then visual evidence, images, can do the job by appealing to people’s senses, nightmares, or even apocalyptic fantasies concerning the alleged end of days on earth. Moreover, since only the dead could perhaps do justice to the horror of annihilation, relying on the evocative and imaginative powers of art or fiction can take us beyond survivor testimony to the very “thingness” of the atrocity by metaphorically bringing the dead back to life. The aesthetic encounter with art marked by historical trauma trains the viewer in appraising large-scale catastrophe in an ethical way insofar as it facilitates a multi-layered—intellectual, emotional, psychological— comprehension of historical mistakes leading to the dehumanization of mankind. In the case of Hiroshima, art and the aesthetically beautiful worked miracles in helping process the trauma of survivors or people affected by, but not necessarily directly involved in, the atomic massacre. In 1995, Japanese artist Yasufumi Takahashi experimented in implicating the, usually passive, viewer in an artistic re-creation of that deadly moment which single-handedly changed the fates of thousands of people. How did he do that? By using beauty as a decoy: He lured spectators into persistently reflecting upon the meanings of witness art, such as his, as well as accepting a position of complicity in the disaster portrayed by that art. In this sense, beauty constitutes an unsettling, rather than mesmerizing, experience, one that humbles spectators out of their complacent attitudes to living and enjoying. Takahashi created an art installation that he called Red Reflection I: a giant sun-shaped disk of discarded clothes painted red and stitched together. Half the disk spreads across the floor, thus bearing resemblance to a setting sun soaked in blood. 77 This is definitely an appealing picture, a beautifully executed artwork that might, however, be seen as immorally aestheticizing atrocity. Nonetheless, Takahashi’s intention was to provoke discussion as to how beauty—exemplified through the aesthetic independence or self-sufficiency of the artwork—should not be taken as the exact counterpart of terror and destruction. The installation, or the nuclear mushroom cloud, could be deemed fascinating and beautiful, but both hide a lot of pain and misery underneath. In this light, and in accordance with the anti-aesthetic outlook which is suspicious of aesthetic representations, beauty is only the pretext for ugliness and cruelty; it is our excuse for not being humane and

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kind-hearted ourselves. According to a post-aesthetic attitude, however, beauty should be there as the ultimate weapon against forgetting and against cruel indifference to humanity. It should be there as the alluring means through which we will be pulled right back on the right track of ethical reflection and personal responsibility. In short, a post-aesthetic version of beauty is already shot through with ethical and political energy available only to those willing to look, bear witness, or even take pleasure. The idea that aesthetics and ethics are poles apart is already an outdated one, as this study has demonstrated so far. 78 A post-aesthetic kind of beauty which secures an ethical stance toward terrorism and manmade violence is consistent with the experience of forbidden beauty that I have investigated throughout. The ethics of forbidden beauty goes beyond prejudice and conventional morality in the sense that the latter prioritize moral and—as Kant would say—“determinant” judgment based upon a priori assessments that reject, for instance, the idea that there is the slightest hint of beauty in an image representation of terror or a particular incident of blatant and blind violence. The ethical value of forbidden beauty lies in recognizing the freedom of the individual to acknowledge the possibility of beauty sneaking into the otherwise “normal” flow of positivist, informational, narrative—even if that sounds immoral. After all, let us repeat, to attend to the existence of beauty (where there should be none. . .) is also to lure the citizen, the documentary viewer, or art admirer into thinking more seriously about, and adopting a more responsible attitude toward, genocide and terrorism. NOTES 1. This chapter first appeared as Emmanouil Aretoulakis, “Acknowledging Fascination with Catastrophe and Terrorism: September 11 and the Nuclear Destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki,” Sanglap, 1, no. 1 (2014). It is used with permission. 2. Satoshi Ukai, “The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: For a ‘Critique of Terrorism’ to Come,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 1 (2005): 235–52. 3. Gene Ray, “History, the Sublime, Terror. Notes on the Politics of Fear,” in Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War, ed. Seamus Kealy, (Blackwood Gallery/ University of Toronto, 2008). 4. Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 11. 5. Ibid., 14. 6. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 34. 7. In Critique of Judgement, Kant argues that [w]ar itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime, the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed.” (sect. 28, 93). If minimum safety is ascertained, that is, the feeling of the aesthetic or the sublime can freely arise. For Kant, the prerequisite of the aesthetic is our feeling that we are not physically in danger ourselves.

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8. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 18. 9. A politics of racism was generally favored when it came to representing the “Yellow Peril” during World War Two. Not just American but also European authorities constructed the Japanese as much less than human. French Prime Minister Edith Cresson, for instance, characterized them as “little yellow men stay[ing] up all night thinking about ways to screw the Americans and Europeans” (quoted in the Sunday Times, 23 June 1991, 13); or as “ants” attempting to colonize the world and take “possession of the future” (David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries [New York: Routledge, 1995], 147). General MacArthur, who was in charge of the American occupational forces in Japan from 1945 to 1951, once stated that “measured by the standards of modern civilization [the Japanese] would be like a boy of twelve” (John Dower, Japan in War and Peace [New York: New Press, 1993], 550). For more information on the (mis)representation of the Japanese nation check out Philip K. Lawrence, “War and Exclusion: The Aesthetics of Modernist Violence,” Global Society 12, no. 1 (1998): 112. 10. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 672. 11. Ibid., 676. 12. Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 349–73. 13. Of course, it was also the miniaturization of nuclear devices that contributed to their transformation from a mass killing machine, a vehicle of atrocious terrorism, to a beautiful work of art. 14. Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics,” 366. 15. Check out chapter 2, note 25. 16. Mark Fiege, “The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder, and the Bomb,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 578–613. 17. See also chapter 2, note 24. 18. Fiege, “The Atomic Scientists,” 601–602. 19. Peggy Rosenthal, “The Mushroom Cloud as Cultural Image,” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 63–92. 20. Ibid., 28. 21. Farrell’s account was included in the official memorandum sent to the Secretary of War by General Leslie Groves, Head of the Manhattan Project at the time: “General Groves’s Report on ‘Trinity,’” July 18, 1945, “Memorandum for the Secretary of War,” from Foreign Relations of the Unites States, Potsdam, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S Government Printing Office, 1960), 1361–68. 22. Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists, 1–2. 23. Edmund F. Byrne, “Nuclear Holocaust in American Films,” Research in Philosophy & Technology 9 (1989): 13–21. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. Ibid., 14. 26. A. W. Eaton, “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian’s Rape of Europa,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (Autumn–Winter 2003): 159–88. 27. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste.” 28. Eaton, “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet,” 165. 29. For Arnold Berleant, we have to “distinguish between art that is itself aesthetically negative and art that exposes negativity” (see Sensibility and Sense, 171). Judging by Berleant’s standards, we could argue that Delacroix’s painting is ethically charged insofar as it “exposes negativity” rather than is “aesthetically negative” itself. 30. Quoted in Matin Zuberi, “Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Strategic Analysis 25, no. 5 (2001): 623–62. 31. Lawrence, “War and Exclusion,” 114. See also M. Sherry, The Creation of Armageddon: The Rise of American Airpower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 273. Lawrence is here quoting Sherry.

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32. Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York, 1984), 193–97. 33. Otis Cary, “Atomic Bomb Targeting—Myths and Realities,” Japan Quarterly 26, no. 4 (October–December 1979): 506–14. 34. The beautiful is not an object, but rather a representation, or an aesthetic appreciation of, the beautiful. In effect, it is a subjective reality. As Zvi Tauber contends, the beautiful “is perceived through free imagination, for it is not experienced in view of actual realities but rather in light of ‘their’ image and appearance. Imagination is unbound by the circumstances of reality” (“Aesthetic Education for Morality: Schiller and Kant,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 3 [2006]: 28). 35. See note 53 to chapter 2. 36. “Aesthetic Cognition,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16, no. 1 (2002): 61–77. 37. Ibid., 70. 38. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 113. 39. Ibid., 113, 107. 40. Ibid., 125–26. 41. Root-Bernstein, “Aesthetic Cognition,” 74. 42. “Terrible Beauty: A-Bomb Tests,” Life, www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/ 33842/terrible-beauty-a-bomb-tests (accessed July 30, 2014). 43. Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear, 424. 44. Ibid., 97. 45. Miyoko Matsubara, “The Spirit of Hiroshima,” 1999, http://www.wagingpeace. org/articles/1999/00/00/_matsubara_spirit-hiroshima.htm (accessed May 23, 2012). 46. http://www.hiroshima-spirit.jp/en/voice/yamasaki_e.html#yamasaki5_E. 47. Thomas C. Schelling, “The Terrorist Use of Nuclear Weapons,” in National Security and International Stability, ed. Bernard Brodie et al. (Cambridge, MA: 1983), 209–25. See also Barton J. Bernstein, “Reconsidering Truman’s Claim of ‘Half a Million American Lives’ Saved by the Bomb: The Construction and Deconstruction of a Myth,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 1 (March 1999): 54–95. 48. Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime, 93. 49. I analyzed, in the beginning of the chapter, the phenomenon of associating scientific effectiveness with the subjective feeling of beauty. 50. Maclear, Beclouded Visions, 9–10. 51. “Ground Zero,” produced by Ian Cameron, CBC Prime Time, January 1995. 52. “The only reason why an object is called beautiful is that its representation immediately produces peculiar pleasure in the subject,” Angelica Nuzzo, “Kant and Herder on Baumgarten’s Aesthetica,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 588. 53. As I have already noted, I draw upon Hillis Miller’s distinction between morality and ethics. By contrast to the latter, the former does not attend at all to “the unique circumstances.” See my Introduction. 54. William T. Lawrence, “Eye Witness Account. Atomic Bomb Mission Over Nagasaki,” War Department, Press Branch, Sunday, September 9, 1945. 55. Nuzzo, “Kant and Herder,” 589. 56. Ibid., 589. 57. Lawrence, “Eye Witness Account.” In fact, the War Department’s press release written by Lawrence abounds in utterly subjective aesthetic remarks such as the author’s personal reactions upon witnessing the mushroom cloud: “a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth,” generating another mushroom “as thought the decapitated monster was growing a new head.” This undoubtedly looks more like a literary narrative than a formal Press Release issued by a government. It takes literature to describe a hardly believable technological and political event of mythical proportions. 58. Kant, Critique of Judgement, sect. 2, 37. 59. John Berger, The Sense of Sight (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 295. 60. Maclear, Beclouded Visions, 36.

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61. Heidegger, Being and Time, 175–79. 62. This is from Bracha Ettinger, “Working Through: A Conversation between Craigie Horsfield and Bracha Ettinger,” quoted in The Life and Death of Images, 214. 63. Maclear, Beclouded Visions, 80. 64. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 114–15. 65. See Davies, “Death’s Dream Kingdom,” 127–32. 66. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4–5. 67. Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki (Nagasaki No Kane), trans. William Johnstone (Tokyo: Kodansho, 1949), 108. For other early Japanese novelists, the nuclear apocalypse does not signify the religious and spiritual inferiority of the Japanese nation but their technological and scientific one. See for instance, Michihito Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, trans. Warren Wells (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1955). 68. Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain: A Novel, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansho, 1969), 19. 69. Black Rain, 162. 70. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143. 71. Lyotard believes that narrativity as memory leads to the reduction of the “real” events that took place. Thus, he inaugurates a politics of forgetting as an effective tactic for presenting the real without formulating, giving form, hence reducing the past. The politics of forgetting is constituted by the refusal to represent, thereby distort, the past. As a result, the past event retains its full dimensions as a sublime, irreducible entity. See how Lyotard addresses the Holocaust as an instance of sublimity, an occurrence that transcends human comprehension, and which cannot be touched upon rationally or visually lest it be distorted and therefore ultimately erased from memory. The only way to respect the memory of the Holocaust is to bear witness to it as an inexplicable newness (an anaesthetic sublimity) that has no before or after, which entails that it cannot be rationalized or put into logical contexts. The only question that we are allowed to ask is whether the Holocaust is coming rather than what the Holocaust is. The what simply obfuscates and ends up wiping out the event because it directly confronts it. For more on this, see Jean Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and the “Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 72. Agamben talks of survivors as “pseudo-witnesses.” See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 34. Relevant to how Agamben and Lyotard grapple with the issue of memory and its elusiveness is Marianne Hirsh’s concept of “postmemory” as the only possible attempt at memory based upon “projection” and “representation” rather than true “recollection.” See, Marianne Hirsh, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelinger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers: University Press, 2006), 214–46. 73. As John Whittier Treat argues, the fact that many hibakusha believed their experiences to be unspeakable and unimaginable posed a “considerable technical and even ethical hurdle” to the possibility of representation. Since many of the survivors were called upon, or felt the need, to put those unspeakable experiences on paper, they would necessarily confront the danger of stylizing their language and making it more literary or “fictional,” thus also risking putting the undeniable truth of their narrative at stake, as potential readers might very well dismiss the content of their stories as fake, fiction, or even “too real.” See Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27. For such “aestheticizing” phenomena with regard to nuclear representations, see also Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005). 74. Nishioka Yuka, Natsu no zanzo (Tokyo: Gaifusha, 2008), 133. The translation of the citation into English is offered by Michele Mason, who also provides a very insightful analysis of the (non)representation of the atomic history of Japan by Japanese

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artists and writers. Check out Mason’s article “Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Twenty-First Century: A New Generation of Historical Manga,” The Asia-Pacific Journal (47–5–09, November 23, 2009). 75. Dong-Yeon Koh, “Murakami’s ‘Little Boy’ Syndrome: Victim or Aggressor in Contemporary Japanese and American Arts?,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2010): 396. 76. See Tomoko Ichitani, “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: The Renarrativation of Hiroshima Memories,” Journal of Narrative Theory 40, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 366. Kouno avoids any direct representations of the atomic blast by focusing on the daily routines of the survivors and the consequences of the bomb upon them. 77. The entire installation was a tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War Two and the nuclear Holocaust. It was presented in Canada, funded by the Japan Foundation in Toronto and the Japan-Canada Fund of the Canada council. 78. There are several important studies of the intersection or complementarity of ethics and aesthetics. See, for example, Jerrold Levinson, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dorota Glowacka, ed., Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries (New York, 2002); or, John Joughin, ed., The New Aestheticism (Manchester, 2003).

FOUR The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Fascination and the Terrorism of Nature

This chapter concerns a different kind of terrorism, one that is rather more freely defined as such: the “terrorism” inflicted on humanity by physical nature (the external world) in cases of so-called “natural catastrophes”—earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on. The main focus here will be the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and its aesthetic impact on eighteenth-century Europe. No doubt, a natural catastrophe hardly qualifies as an act of terrorism if we are to view it through conventional frameworks. Nevertheless, there are a great number of resemblances between terrorism and nonmanmade disasters, the most obvious of which being that both involve extreme violence as if from nowhere and both engender terror in the minds of those who are directly affected by them. Furthermore, due to their “unnatural” force, they both break with what came before by means of unsettling, at least momentarily, the social fabric and the sense of order in individual consciousness. For example, right after an act of terrorism the feeling of security is undermined, while in the aftermath of a terrible earthquake it is the sense of safety that is compromised. Critical questions, though, remain: Can we view natural disasters as terrorist disasters? More particularly, can we treat physical nature at its most extreme as nature’s terrorism against the human? In short, is a grand earthquake terrorist, and is it felt like one? For one thing, assuming that terrorist activity is at times experienced as a natural catastrophe, why wouldn’t the opposite be just as plausible a hypothesis, namely, why can’t natural catastrophe be seen as asymmetrical, irrational, unjust and inhumane, just like terrorism? In the previous chapter I made the claim that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear disas105

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ters were not at all that—mere “disasters”—but nuclear attacks that fall easily under the category of terrorism insofar as they targeted and killed noncombatants indiscriminately, were totally uncalled for, and intended to crush the morale of an entire nation. 1 Those unquestionably terrorist attacks were, in fact, experienced by survivors as commensurate with a real Apocalypse or as something that would have happened anyway, something of the order of nature waiting for its turn in order to happen— indeed a natural disaster. 2 The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a natural disaster that resembled or even constituted, in the eyes of the beholders, a lethal act of intimidation (which is the main constituent of what terrorism means today) perpetrated by an unknown force (God?) utilizing the terrible might of nature. For contemporary critics, it was the embodiment of pure natural evil. 3 In fact, on an etymological basis, “terror” and the “shaking” of the earth look naturally connected; in ancient as well as modern Greek, for instance, the verb “tremein” means both, to shake seismically and to tremble out of terror. Aside from their etymological affinity, it is true that what terror(ism) and earthquakes have in common is an ambivalent irrationality—neither can readily or unswervingly be imputed to a certain cause: when they occur, we only experience their excessive violence without simultaneously being able to understand them. But strangely, in our imagination, both are suspected of engaging somehow in a secret alliance with some evil and immoral will or agency. As Jean Baudrillard concedes in “The Violence of the Global,” “[t]he dominant characteristic of irrational events is that they can be imputed to anybody or given any motivation. To some extent, anything we can think of can be criminal, even a cold front or an earthquake.” 4 (Manmade) terrorism and extreme natural phenomena may be seen as contiguous terms, or even interchangeable to the extent that they share also similar tactics: “[T]he terrorist works best when she acts most like the earthquake and says nothing, proclaims nothing in advance of the attack. Their terrible latency is their strength— that of the sleeper cell and dormant volcano: a latency that often leads forecasters to doubt the possibility of their ever happening. Hence what natural disaster and terrorist act share is a paradoxical entry into reality.” 5 To such an irrational entry one could add an utter indifference to human life. The terror spawned during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake might be likened to a case of terrorism to the extent that there was, like in “classic” instances of terrorism, a safety (or security) breach which undermined the up-to-then widespread belief in God’s benevolence and led to the dissemination of fear and uncertainty. In a strange way, there is an uncanny analogy between 1755 Lisbon and 2001 New York: The mid-eighteenth century was an uncomfortable time of transition in both natural and moral philosophies. It also presaged a technological

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revolution which was shortly to cause major upheavals in Western society. Similarly, the third millennium begins at a time when humanity struggles to assimilate the technology it has created. . . . Both disasters affected great commercial cities with extensive networks of influence abroad. Both dealt a body blow to trade and prestige, though not a fatal one. . . . After Lisbon, the prevailing sense of optimism in the human condition suffered a period of collapse; after the World Trade Center disaster, optimism in the power of technology to advance human interests faltered, though perhaps temporarily. 6

In both cases, the technologically and scientifically unthinkable or irrational assumed abruptly the status of an intruder into a general atmosphere of complacency and optimism. Baudrillard thinks that during the Enlightenment the irrational broke into the consciousness of the European subject or citizen as a terrifying (or terrorist, I would say) otherness which was impossible to integrate into the discourse of science, rationality, and moderation. 7 Of course, we should not forget, in eighteenth-century aesthetics it was Burke who had fantasized about the possibility of such irrational otherness under the guise of terrible geological as well as political phenomena (earthquakes and the French Revolution, respectively). The name he gave that otherness was the sublime. 8 In 1755 Lisbon the inconceivable catastrophe was, as will be seen later in the chapter, almost immediately imputed by Catholic authorities to a wrathful and vengeful God whose intention was to terrorize, justifiably in their opinion, the human race for having gone astray. But there were also other voices—such as Alexander Pope—that, imbued with the spirit of rationalism and optimism, called for the need to see the bigger picture through acceptance of the fact that God deliberately created a little evil (an earthquake, for instance) so as to spread universal goodness in the long run. This was a process which was obviously unintelligible by human beings who, in the opinion of bishop Joseph Butler articulated in his 1736 book Analogy of Religion, could not possibly conceive of the immensity and scope of Creation. 9 In other words, God may be a “terrorist,” still a benevolent and loving one. Contrary to such beliefs, there were those— such as Voltaire—who expressed their horror and disappointment as they only saw evil, rather than benevolence, dominating the world. Satanic or not, that evil was apparently indicative of God’s indifference to mankind and His decision to leave humans at the mercy of the unknown, at the hands of insurmountable terror. Allegedly, the Lisbon earthquake encapsulated precisely that terror to which humanity was subjugated. In fact, the physical forcefulness of the earthquake was to be seen by some as illustrating the supposedly “undeniable” truth that there was an evil agency on earth, acting arbitrarily and killing almost at will. If the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunted people’s imagination and traumatized the collective psyche in the twentieth century, the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 left an ineradicable imprint

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on popular imagination. That natural catastrophe, according to eminent scholars, “affected contemporary Europe in a way comparable to that which the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima has had on the world.” 10 Even the word “Lisbon” itself, throughout the eighteenth century, bore connotations similar to the ones born by the word “Auschwitz” today. 11 Critical opinions generally converge on the idea that the Lisbon earthquake constitutes an unprecedented event not only in terms of its magnitude or fierceness but also in terms of its much grander repercussions on religious, philosophical, as well as scientific thought. IMAGINATION: WITNESSING THE INEFFABLE But what exactly happened in the city of Lisbon on November 1, 1755? It was a beautiful, windless and sunny Saturday, All Saints Day, and the narrow streets of Catholic Lisbon were teeming with people heading to church to observe their religious obligations. A great number of the citizens had naturally flowed to St. Vincent’s church (Vincent being the patron saint of Lisbon) while others were probably attending service at the several other churches of the city. 12 Suddenly, at around 09:40 a.m. a roaring noise was heard and the earth began to tremble, entire buildings and houses started to shake, church walls swayed and soon collapsed, crushing lots of worshippers beneath them. Very soon, fire broke out in numerous spots around Lisbon, as many of the people stormed out of

Figure 4.1. The Great Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami of 1755. Reproduced with the written permission of NISEE and the U.S. Regents.

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their crumbling houses in panic leaving behind candles that had been lit for the day or fires already burning in thousands of hearths around the city. Those that were already outside their residencies fled the city’s stifling alleys and narrow streets to more open spaces and squares to avoid the falling marble and timber. A few minutes later there would be a second, much more forceful, earthquake and a third one, reducing to rubble the rest of the buildings that had remained standing. The rage of earth and fire forced the majority of the horrified population to rush to the port and the square near the river Tagus to seek refuge from what, in their minds, felt like Judgment Day. The irony of it all was that their would-be savior, water, would turn out to be the earthquake’s accomplice since, at around 11.00 a.m. there arose three tsunamis that would hit against the city’s waterfront with great forcefulness, flooding many areas, sinking ships, destroying facilities, and killing hundreds of people. In a nutshell, approximately 250,000 souls lived in Lisbon in 1755 and almost one-third of them were gone within a single day. 13 The earthquake was so strong—it was estimated almost 9.0 on the Richter scale—that it was felt in many other European countries such as Spain, France, Italy, even Britain where unusually high sea waves were noticed. Of course, it was not the first time that Europe was confronted with major earthquakes. There had been serious seismic events before 1755. Lisbon, in particular, was severely shaken a number of times before. In 1531 the city was struck by a major earthquake that was presumably as destructive as the 1755 one, while in 1551 two thousand people were killed during a similar terrifying event. 14 However, the great Lisbon earthquake was unique insofar as the physical tremors of the earth on November 1, 1755 were far outstripped by the metaphysical aftershocks: The disaster shook the foundations of religion and philosophy while laying the groundwork for what we would later call “modern science.” For one thing, due to the calamitous dimensions of the earthquake, the philosophy of “Optimism” dominating Europe at the time was seriously questioned. The “optimism” theory had been based on Gottfried Leibniz’s work Theodicy which expressed the view that the world was governed by a benevolent and omnipotent God and that all the suffering and all the ordeals humanity was going through were part of a bigger plan, a grander scheme leading to God’s ultimately “universal good.” Man, through the optimistic viewpoint, inhabited the best of all possible worlds. Alexander Pope picked up where Leibniz left off, arguing, via his poem “An Essay on Man,” that “whatever is, is right,” which essentially implied that God’s plan was too elaborate and complex for humanity to comprehend. In this light, everything that seemed evil on earth should be welcomed as something integral to the greater laws of nature connected to the so-called Great Chain of Being—in essence, that is, evil paradoxically served goodness:

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Pope extols “nature” (which, for him, does not primarily mean the external world) as God’s infinitely beautiful creation, His discordant but ultimately harmonious artwork which should not be doubted, investigated, or analyzed, for it was what it was. Implicitly, Pope was subscribing to the Christian principle of unwavering submission, on the part of the individual, to divine providence. More interestingly, though, he was calling for a universal aesthetic appreciation of God’s perfect “artwork”—the cosmos. This artwork was not beautiful in the sense that it could easily accommodate humans’ vision of the world—as a matter of fact, it could not. Quite the contrary, it was beautiful exactly because it ran counter to humanity’s petty and short-sighted interests by deliberately not purging itself of evil and catastrophe: The idea was that in a world that was evilfree the grand scheme would not be fulfilled. Moreover, the divine artwork was beautiful precisely because it was incomprehensible. Any attempt to unlock its mechanisms would end up ruining its beauty. Through this optimistic lens, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people should not abstain from appreciating, in a manner that Kant would later name “disinterested,” the Natural Art unveiling before them. Pope wrote “An Essay on Man” almost twenty years before the Lisbon earthquake (1733–1734) and died before he had an opportunity to see how his “optimism” philosophy was to be put to the test. Indeed, applying retrospectively Pope’s philosophy to the general speculations as to the real cause of the earthquake would lead one to the conclusion that the disaster was a blessing in disguise, as, for some unknown reason, it had to happen so that Nature’s beautiful (because harmoniously discordant) plan could be realized; not only was the disaster inevitable, therefore, as Pope might have argued, but it was also necessary. Voltaire, Pope’s friend, had a serious problem understanding how a world full of misery and evil could be the best of all possible worlds. To him, it was flagrantly unjust and unethical to argue that the residents of Lisbon, including children, had to die a horrible death so that God’s or simply Nature’s beautiful plan would be fulfilled. 16 Still, figures of high philosophical caliber such as Immanuel Kant espoused Pope’s ideas and criticized humanity’s self-centeredness and the assumption that we are the only object of God’s attentions. Kant, fascinated with the purportedly colossal catastrophe, wrote three essays on the Lisbon earthquake. In the first of these, he attributes earthquakes to big fires at the center of the earth trying in vain to escape through subterranean channels. He also expresses the view that the shaking of the earth proves beneficial for the

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survival of the different species on earth and of the planet itself, considering that it helps, as he thinks, the formation of useful metals and contributes to the warming of the ground in winter. 17 It would not be far from the truth to argue that Kant promoted the “all is well” theory by aestheticizing, in a way, the full cycle of nature’s transformations which does not rule out the possibility of terrifying and deadly phenomena occurring for the very sake of the preservation of life. In short, life on earth was beautiful because nothing seemed redundant or prescribed beforehand. Especially with regard to the latter, Kant discerned the possibility of a liberated human existence via the “all is well” theoretical framework, without, however, the teleological premise of that framework. As a critic puts it, “it is the basically enigmatic character of nature in relation to God’s intentions, and to the laws of nature . . . that constitutes the condition of possibility—a precious notion in Kant—for the human being to be really human.” 18 Only by encountering the unintelligibility of nature can humanity attain a real freedom. As is wellknown, however, Kant would later elaborate his ideas concerning overwhelming (or not) natural phenomena into more solid aesthetic categories such as that of the sublime and the beautiful. In an intellectual climate that favored optimism and promoted the notion of universal harmony, the earthquake in Portugal came as a shock. Lisbon residents who experienced the fury of the elements and witnessed the (almost) unprecedented catastrophe found themselves at a loss for words, unable to articulate the ineffable. One of the more detailed eyewitness accounts came from Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, a Portuguese priest and perhaps the most eminent theologian, historian, and rhetorician of the country. As he wrote, the disaster was worthy of being committed to memory, and handed down to latest posterity. For never was there a more dreadful catastrophe either seen or heard of in this country, insomuch, that one would think the Deity was resolved to punish the iniquities of many ages in a single day. . . . [T]he weather being then very serene, and the sea calm, a dreadful noise was heard, like a rumbling underground, when the whole country about Lisbon felt a sudden shock. . . . [T]he ground was seen to move up and down, and like a ship to toss alternately from east to west, and from north to south. [T]he floors and ceilings began to crack, the roofs to fall, the arches to give way with a horrid noise. From the ruins immediately a prodigious cloud of dust arose, which spread a sudden darkness over the distressed city. . . . The fifth (sic) earthquake was immediately followed by an extraordinary and almost incredible rising of the waters [probably owing to] some subterraneous matter [that] broke in upon the ocean. . . . [A]t Lisbon the waters of the ocean overflowed the land . . . whereby bridges were broken down, walls were overturned, and trunks of trees . . . were thrown upon the shore. 19

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This description seems to be a rather moderate one, producing the hard “facts” on the whole and avoiding sensationalist language to artificially attract attention and increase readership. It is a well-balanced, carefully crafted and quite secular account insofar as Figueiredo does not stick to the potentially primary cause of the earthquake—an infuriated God—but moves on to expose possible secondary natural causes for the trembling of the earth as well as the “incredible rising of the waters” which he attributes, quite secularly and “scientifically” one might say, to some subterraneous matter rather than metaphysical agency. In fact, the “extraordinary and almost incredible” tsunami proves, toward the end of the sentence, to be almost credible because reducible, somehow, to reason—subterranean activity. The author of the excerpt above speaks of the need to imprint the memory of the disaster permanently on the mind of the posterity and, to this purpose, uses “journalistic” expressions (such as the apposite but strangely neutral phrase “dreadful catastrophe”) to disseminate the news about the event. Potentially a sample of a precociously enlightened version of the history of natural catastrophes, his rather dispassionate narrative attempts to give a careful description of what really went on during that day, but, in many cases, misses the target by not appealing to the heart of the reader as much as her mind. 20 Of course, the Lisbon earthquake marks admittedly the beginning of the age of the Enlightenment when reason manages to rule over fear or passion, but disengagement from superstition should not necessarily entail the expulsion of imagination. As I have argued in previous chapters, to do justice through writing to a horrific historical event, one is required to activate one’s own aesthetic sensibilities so as to goad the reader’s imagination into a more empathic mentality or a more “enlarged” one. 21 To come close to really comprehending a disastrous event is to engage our imaginative and aesthetic capacities or instincts. Figueiredo, however, does not seem to share that attitude. In a letter concerning the disaster, a British doctor named Richard Wolfall recounts the dramatic moments in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake: The shocking sight of the dead bodies, together with the shrieks and cries of those who were half-buried in the ruins, are only known to those who were eyewitnesses. It far exceeds all description, for the fear and consternation was so great, that the most resolute person durst not stay a moment to remove a few stones off the friend he loved most. . . . Had the misery ended here, it might in some degree have been admitted of redress. . . . [I]n about two hours after the shock, fires broke out . . . occasioned from the goods and the kitchen fires being all jumbled together. . . . Indeed every element seemed to conspire to our destruction; . . . the tide rose forty feet higher in an instant than was

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ever known, and as suddenly subsided. . . . As soon as we had time for recollection, nothing but death was present in our imaginations. 22

This is a much more aesthetic and much less cognitive description of the calamity. Far from retaining a neutral, sustained tone that would objectively yield the real horror, the narrative opens itself up to the reader’s imaginative capacities, thus demonstrating that to understand what really went on in Lisbon during that day, one has to also imagine it. From the very beginning of his account, Wolfall de-legitimates the testimony of those who were not eyewitnesses, as he seems firm in his belief that the “shocking sight” cannot possibly be conveyed by people who had only heard or read about the disaster; it could be processed, or made sense of, only by those who had the “privilege” to see with their own eyes, who would be prepared for a personal negotiation with the horrific images of pain and death. Wolfall gives the addressee of the letter all the mindnumbing details of the catastrophe through the assumption of an apocalyptic and literary tone meant to affect his friend’s heart and sensibilities. Of course, the most shocking detail here is not the destruction of humanity by so-called “inanimate” nature but rather the violent transformation of humans into something inhuman or dehumanized. The idea, for instance, that the residents of Lisbon were so panic-stricken that they did not even care to “remove a few stones off the friend [they] loved most” speaks volumes about how the natural (but egotistic) will for self-preservation kept the citizens from entering the minds of their co-sufferers and imagining the despair, thereby empathizing with their plight rather than focusing on their own ordeals. The importance of imagination in (re)establishing connection with one’s own humanity in the face of catastrophe is highlighted, for example, by Ian McEwan with regard to the September 11 terrorist attacks. McEwan thinks that the Al Qaeda terrorists did not place themselves in the victims’ shoes while carrying out those unspeakable deeds; and this is precisely why they went through with their plan: It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion. . . . The hijackers used fanatical certainty . . . to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. 23

The terrorists failed to imagine what it is to be someone else, in the same way that Lisbon citizens running for their lives failed to imagine and understand the plight of others who were heartlessly left behind. It takes an aesthetic judgment to respond to such crisis or failure. Arendt elaborates Kant’s insight, in the Critique of Judgement, that it is imagination and the aesthetic (in the form of aesthetic reflection or disinterested judgment) that render humans critical and free beings and their conduct ethi-

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cal. More particularly, she picks upon Kant’s impression that an enlargement of the mind is accomplished by setting our taste and judgment off against the possible rather than actual judgment of others—thus marking an imagined (or even “pre-empted”) sensus communis—as well as by thinking as if we were those others: “The faculty which makes this possible is called imagination. . . . Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection.” In a way, through imagination, critical thinking “makes the others present.” 24 One can deduce from the above that imagination is pivotal for the individual insofar as it constitutes an aesthetic platform for cultivating an instinct for more ethical and just attitudes toward human history. Simultaneously, it is a faculty for comprehending and communicating the full magnitude of watershed events such as a natural catastrophe that has no precedent, an unthinkable terrorist attack or nuclear disaster. Wolfall appeals to his reader’s imagination to convey the apocalypse-like effect that the disaster had upon eyewitnesses, for he senses that to understand the disaster one has to activate one’s own imaginative skills and aesthetic capabilities rather than try to comprehend it rationally. In this light, aside from the nearly “terrorist” characteristics that he attributes to the elements—in the case at hand, the elements are seemingly “conspiring” against the human—the author plays with the primal collective fantasy of the end of days at the vengeful hands of an unforgiving God, thus, in a way, implicating more dramatically (or even incriminating) the otherwise passive or distanced reader. Imagination combined with the overwhelming feeling of an imminent Apocalypse features in numerous eyewitness accounts of the earthquake and its immediate aftermath in Lisbon. In one case, those terrifyingly deafening moments during the violent tremors of the earth were captured as followed by “an Egyptian darkness” hovering over the city, a darkness “such as might be felt.” 25 Here, darkness is felt to be an actual presence ominously ambushing the crowds. As far as “the twenty-foot tsunami” is concerned, according to another account, it looked “like a mountain” as it attacked the land “roaring and foaming.” 26 Moreover, the usually calm Tagus River suddenly turned into a “confused forest of entangled masts, and a horrible cemetery of floating corpses” 27 ; whereas the disappearance of the brand-new quay, on which lots of people had been standing awaiting rescue from the sea, convinced onlookers that “the dissolution of the world was at hand” leading sinners to their excruciating deaths through the burning gates of Hell. 28 Aware that to have witnessed the calamity is to have been terribly lost, a British merchant acknowledges his huge luck in that he did not just see it with his own eyes but he also survived it to tell the world about the horrific event: “[T]o have seen this disaster and to tell it is a great comfort, but I cannot possibly refrain from tears; we all of us appear as if risen from the dead.” 29 “Egyptian darkness,” a roaring wave “like a mountain,” a “ce-

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metery of floating corpses,” flabbergasted survivors appearing “as if risen from the dead”: all this figurative language has the purpose of unveiling the catastrophe for what it was, namely, something inexplicable, irrational and, to a certain extent, unreal. The anthropomorphic presentation of inanimate natural force pricks the imagination by invoking God’s sublimity as well as His will to impose divine justice on humanity for all its wrongdoing. 30 The need to resort to metaphoric schemas is attributable to the unconscious realization that it is through metaphor, simile, metonymy, and so on, in short, through what we generally call “literature” that one can speak directly to the soul and mind of one’s listener, and thereby, communicate the seriousness and truthfulness of an event. Actually, it is through metaphor that humans admittedly express themselves. Metaphors are not rhetorical and ornamental means of communication, but rather systems that are built into the very structure of how we speak. Linguists and social scientists generally agree that metaphors are integral to processes of cognition, not separable from them: Metaphors are particularly useful when people are attempting to convey experiences most resistant to expression. Indeed, because painnarratives are most often fragmentary, rather than elaborate accounts, the analysis of metaphors can be particularly rewarding for historians of pain. It is difficult to imagine how people could communicate (to themselves as well as to others) the sensation and meaning of pain without metaphoric crutches. 31

It would be possible to transmit a clear message or piece of information without the help of metaphors, but the result would not be something to which the receiver of the message could authentically relate. Metaphors render us capable of imagining, hence, comprehending and eventually identifying with the other’s predicament (at the same time that they enable us to understand our own). Edmund Burke contends that “it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination.” 32 What this statement entails for historical narratives of horror is the risk of, paradoxically, obscuring the real when you opt for clarity—a quality that tends somehow to demystify the horrific occurrence by reducing it to a mere rationalizable entity. By contrast, if the description of the idea leaves much to the imagination of the listener/viewer, an emotional space is likely to be created that will render the individual more enlightened and more ethically involved in the thing described as well as more empathic. In essence, the more emotionally “alert” we are to the Lisbon tragedy the more emphatically its memory will be etched in the mind. It sounds legitimate to say that to bring out the truth we need to— consciously or not—take to fiction, the unreal, or even the extravagant, probably because the scope of reason and the rational mind seems too

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limited to address a catastrophe which comes as if directly out of an individual’s innermost fears or nightmares. The Portuguese capital “looked, not like Lisbon, but like a twisted nightmarish version of itself,” as Nicholas Shrady points out in his recent study. 33 At issue is not a simple transmission of information but the conveyance of an experience that is too real to be contemplated in a cognitive and “realistic” manner. The image of a nightmarish and twisted city springs out of readers’ dark and forbidden fantasies. We become spectators of an aesthetic vision; a picture that illustrates what Judgment Day must look like. The metaphoric language employed by Shrady points to the idea that it takes an aesthetic appreciation of the Lisbon event to assimilate its insufferable reality; in other words, to do justice to it we need to clothe it in imaginary and aesthetic terms. DELIGHT: REPRESENTATION, TERROR AND EDMUND BURKE The shocking earthquake had an impact with no precedent on stunned Europe, and became almost instantly major news in newspapers and pamphlets of the time. During the first month after the disaster there were around twenty references to the event in London newspapers. 34 It is not difficult to figure out the reasons for attracting so much attention. As already shown, Europe was already acquainted with news of devastating earthquakes and their ensuing tsunamis in the past—Lima, Peru, in 1746 standing out as the most popular example at the time—but those events concerned distant lands and far-off places that could hardly appeal to the European heart. Despite its location at the bottom-left-hand corner of Europe, Lisbon was considered an absolutely European city, a commercial center, and one of the busiest ports of the continent along with London and Amsterdam. Remnants of its glorious past as the wealthiest empire in the world were still visible in the country with its magnificent architecture and its cosmopolitan air, in spite of the unequivocally negative personal accounts of the city, especially by British subjects, as a very dirty place that is certainly not worth visiting for touristic, or other, purposes. 35 Portugal had long been a faithful ally of England, at least ever since the Treaty of Windsor was signed in 1386, but especially after the early eighteenth-century forging of the Anglo-Portuguese ties with the signing of the Methuen Treaty which consolidated the privileged status that Britain enjoyed in Portugal at the level of commerce and economy. Of course, it was not only Britain but also France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands (among others) that had economic interests in Portugal and therefore could not overlook, or take lightly, the Lisbon catastrophe. For the reasons stated above Lisbon could not but attract international attention by hitting the headlines of newspapers, periodicals, and various

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pamphlets squeezing into their pages as much (usually unreliable) information on the disaster as they could. In fact, the unusual phenomenon “sparked the eighteenth-century equivalent of a mass-media frenzy and the sobriety of the initial reports gave way to ever more lurid and sensational accounts.” 36 It could be argued that it was possibly the first great mass media event in recorded history. Although there were still no newspapers printed on a daily basis, the culture of print communication had already been disseminated in Europe, which had the opportunity to witness the (narratives as well as pictures of) catastrophe almost firsthand and, as we would say today, in real time: The power of information and the fascination stemming from it were gradually but suggestively revealing themselves in the face of the disaster. The more information was released, the more intense the desire of readers, as distant spectators, to learn additional details of the horror; conversely, the more insatiable the readers’ lust, the more fascinating the accounts or “communiqués” of the media of the period. The dissemination of eyewitness accounts and fanciful or relatively accurate pictures throughout the continent contributed to the creation of a world stage upon which an aestheticized tragedy was being enacted and a “politically correct” (as we would label it today) performance of emotions was being played out. One of the basic ingredients of Western modernity (initiated during the Enlightenment and, to a great extent, due to the Lisbon earthquake), according to contemporary criticism, is the turning of the world into picture and representation. Even in the context of the most “ungovernable” of disasters (such as the storm or the tsunami) nature is rendered into a picture that at once domesticates nature by enframing it and, simultaneously, guarantees, through this process of enframing, the position of the spectator who watches the drama unfold from the safety of the shore. 37

This excerpt raises a very crucial issue: that in the modern West there is nothing that can be characterized as too majestic or sublime, simply because humanity’s potential for representation has reached a wholly new level. Modernist practices, which might well be traced back to the period of the Lisbon earthquake, have made sure that even the most indomitably fierce natural phenomenon or manmade catastrophe can be born witness to as long as there is an available spectator who is ready to enframe, objectify, contain, and finally aestheticize it. In other words, even the most “ungovernable” and sublime tsunami or earthquake can be transformed into a fascinating or even beautiful representation of human tragedy, provided that there exists an aesthetic distance between the tragedy at hand and the person who is wondering at, appreciating, or is even horrified by it. Consider, for instance, the reference to the disaster in The Gentleman’s Magazine: “[A] most dreadful earthquake . . . continued about eight hours, by which . . . 100,000 persons were buried in the ruins,”

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while “the remains of the city was set on fire, in several places, by flames which issued from the bowels of the earth, and continued burning from one extremity to the other, at the departure of the couriers to the cours of France and Spain.” 38 It is obvious that for publicity purposes the newspapers of the time would consciously resort to sensationalist, apocalyptic, and quasi-mythological descriptions to excite the imagination of the already astonished European citizens. Nonetheless, despite labelling the catastrophe as “a most dreadful one,” The Gentleman’s Magazine manages to contain its horror by condensing its dreadfulness in a few telling lines that, however, omit the real human blood shed on the streets of Lisbon. We learn of a hundred thousand victims—which exaggerates the actual death toll, still, constitutes an “enticing” and beautiful kind of number— or of how the remainder of the city was burnt to ashes (by all devouring flames issuing from a raging earth) conveniently enough for the image of utter destruction to be materialized. To both, today’s reader and an eighteenth-century one, this looks like fiction whose edges have delicately been rounded off, so to speak; a visually compelling account that contains just the “right” amount of panoramically archaic destruction so as to captivate without repulsing. 39 But is a literary description of the disaster what the Lisbon horror was all about? The aestheticization of images of horror broaches the question of the ethics (and, more significantly, the unethics, in the sense of the immoral) implicit in the narratives of those who tend to naturally feel sympathy for the people involved in a horrific incident. In Sharon Sliwinski’s view, the 1755 disaster “marks one of the first instances in which subjects became spectators faced with the ethical and political implications regarding distant suffering . . . [or faced with] a barrage of . . . ‘snapshots’ that elicited an imaginative and affective engagement with strangers at a great distance.” 40 Whereas Sliwinski focuses upon the question of what the term “human rights” means in the world and how it means—she more or less claims, for instance, that via the aesthetic road (images and stories) we are made capable of discovering the full materiality rather than abstractness of human rights, an issue that concerns also my own discussion of the ethical in aesthetic representations of history 41 —what I want to focus on at this point is the secret individual fascination generated while reading eyewitness accounts of the unexpected catastrophe, or encountering exaggerated, or not, pictures of the Lisbon destruction (created in the immediate aftermath or even long after the event), or even visiting the real Lisbon in order to witness the destruction with one’s own eyes and subsequently fantasize about what it must have been like experiencing the event. In my view, what very frequently marks such aesthetic encounters is not “the spectator’s inevitable failure to grasp the sublime event in its entirety” 42 ; far from that, it is the shocking realization that the spectator has become thoroughly enamored with the linguistic and image-representation of the horrific event which, in turn, and on an un-

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conscious level, is gradually changing from a “sublime,” indescribable occurrence to a “beautiful,” fully aestheticizable one—isn’t that an infinitely immoral procedure? Since the earthquake, “catastrophe has lent itself to a monumental and memorializing panoramic aesthetic” which proves that the “monument and the catastrophic are two sides of the same gaze” as we learn, and to talk about catastrophic panorama, the sublime, the beautiful and the aesthetic in a single breath is to address spectatorship as it arises, probably for the first time, out of the ashes of shattered Lisbon. 43 As Alain Corbin explains, the emergence of the eighteenth-century spectator was associated with a newly arisen pleasure in the ocean as well as an unacknowledged fascination with oceanic catastrophe embodied, for instance, in the (image of the) shipwreck—which was often visible from the land. Of course, the pleasure at stake presupposed a physical distance from catastrophe, so that spectators could safely gaze at the tragedy from the shore (or read about it from the safety of their own homes) and attest to the ineffable plight of the people involved. However, the potential readers or spectators did not think of the shore as merely a place from which to view the sublime anger of the elements; they also experienced it as a vast stage surrounded by the headlands, with the infinite expanse of water as a backdrop. Contemplating nature’s excesses created the dramaturgy of feelings. There gestures of farewell, nostalgic posturing, the collective vigil for the return of ships, and especially the horror of the shipwreck could be easily staged. . . . The history of self-presentation in the Enlightenment generated a theatricality that belonged to the street, as well as specific expressions and social form of effusiveness. 44

In his work Corbin informs us that before the eighteenth century the Western subject used to be fearful of the ocean and the seaside because of their association, in the collective imagination, with the Biblical Flood, but with the advent of the Enlightenment the subject overcame the terror of the elements, managed to reaffirm her superiority to them—which is, basically, what Kant meant by his notion of the feeling of the sublime— and rendered formerly terrifying sights into harmless objects that could be appreciated aesthetically from a distance. The important thing here, though, is that the initial terror was not suddenly lost in the middle of the century but continued to be staged, or performed anew, in the context of a dramaturgy of feelings. What is implied, of course, is that feelings of empathy before a shipwreck or an earthquake constituted theatrical and rhetorical gestures grounded upon the premise of morality—an idea which is entailed by Edmund Burke’s discussion of sympathy and pity. What lay behind that rhetoric, I believe, was associated with the covert wish to freely contemplate the disastrous but fascinating spectacle, regardless of the immorality implicit in the act. Keeping this in mind, we

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should by no means be surprised if the eighteenth-century reader of the following excerpt, based on an English merchant’s eyewitness account, were absolutely captivated by it, to the point of fascination: On a sudden I heard a general outcry. The sea is coming in, we shall all be lost. Upon this, turning my eyes toward the river . . . I could perceive it heaving and swelling in a most unaccountable manner, as no wind was stirring. In an instant there appeared at some small distance a vast body of water . . . [coming] on foaming and roaming, and rushed toward the shore with such impetuosity that tho’ we all immediately ran for our lives as fast as possible many were swept away. . . . [I] observed the ships tumbling and tossing about. . . . Some . . . were whirled round with incredible swiftness, several large boats were turned keel upwards [while] a great number of boats . . . full of people . . . were swallowed up, as in a whirlpool, and never more appeared. 45

As horrifying this account is in its liveliness and immediacy, it makes us want to read always more. We are aware of the need to show pity and solidarity either by ceasing to read or by expressing our repulsion, but, on the other hand, we cannot resist the temptation to go on as this is probably nothing like anything we have read before. In short, we can feel the beauty of the thing as encapsulated in the fascinating story that we cannot look away from. The merchant narrating the story, just like the reader bearing witness, in a way, to the horrid reality of the earthquake, is obviously a survivor who has already kept some distance from the event he is describing, and as a result, he does not need to shrink from recounting his own memories, thus turning his description into a beautiful narrative with no rough edges, given that on the one hand he is trying to convey the “sublimely” excruciating moments, while on the other he is unknowingly offering an aesthetic product that is ready for consumption by the reading public which already has an appetite for it. Edmund Burke elaborated upon that immoral appetite in the following excerpt from A Philosophical Enquiry, a work that contains allusions rather than direct references to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake: It is a common observation that objects which in the reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure. This taken as a fact, has been the cause of much reasoning. The satisfaction has been commonly attributed, first, to the comfort we receive in considering that so melancholy a story is no more than a fiction; and next, to the contemplation of our own freedom from the evils which we see represented. 46

Burke is here telling us that terrible objects or phenomena are not capable of frightening us when they are (presented as) fictional representations; on the contrary, they generate in us the feeling of pleasure, which he attributes partly to our sense of physical independence from them and partly to our conviction that they are not real, and consequently, the

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people represented in them are not suffering any real pain. If we hear of a catastrophe that has occurred far away from us, we are aware, on the one hand, that we run very little risk of being harmed by it, and on the other, we feel free to dismiss it as fictional. Aside from the fact that Lisbon’s threefold—earthquake, tsunami, fire—catastrophe was initially viewed as something fictitious indeed (a falsity blamed by British authorities on the French!), it was also treated by many as too remote from the rest of Europe not to cause a certain kind of aesthetic fascination or even pleasure. This kind of pleasure is very similar to Burke’s idea concerning human curiosity, which he defined as whatever desire we have or whatever pleasure we take in novelty 47 —the latter, novelty, being the main constituent of the beautiful. 48 The Lisbon event was such a novelty to distant, hence safe, spectators who had the opportunity to “enframe” it in aesthetic terms either through an appreciation of the artworks depicting the disaster or through an aesthetic appraisal of the disaster via the (allegedly) accurate eyewitness accounts that appeared in European periodicals. Because, as Burke concedes, there is no spectacle we so enthusiastically take pleasure in, “as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.” 49 What Burke calls “pleasure” and “satisfaction” before instances of fictional terror he later names “delight” at the sight of real terror: I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others. . . . [W]e must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind. . . . [T]error is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close, and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection. 50

If we are drawn by the real misfortunes of others, according to Burke, it means that there must be some kind of delight involved, provided, of course, that there is some distance between ourselves and the misfortunes (or that terror “does not press too close”). This might have been an acknowledgment of humanity’s deep-seated immorality had he not gone out of his way to persuade us that such a delight or pleasure is attributed to a physiological, rather instinctual, element “that is antecedent to any reasoning” and which “works us to its own purposes, without our concurrence.” 51 In other words, the feeling of delight at stake is a natural reaction and there is nothing we can do about it, except espouse it for what it is. His treatment of pity is even more intriguing though (albeit also symptomatic of his conservatism), given that at the same time that he associates it with humans’ self-absorption and egotism—the pain we feel encourages us to relieve ourselves in “relieving those who suffer,” he admits 52 —he reverts to a rather moralistic thinking by assigning pity the quality of “love and social affection.” One can discern, at this point, Burke’s subtle effort to contain somehow the aesthetic “revelry” implicit

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in his thought by simultaneously bringing into the discussion issues of love and a sense of decorum. In Burke’s thought, fascination with the real may surprisingly outweigh the natural attraction we feel toward great art, for instance, a magnificent theater performance: The nearer [a tragedy] approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power. But . . . it never approaches what it represents. Chuse (sic) a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors . . . and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts. 53

No matter how perfect the imitation, it is always the real thing that appeals to us, says Burke, especially if it involves bearing witness to terror, and more particularly an aesthetic appreciation of the suffering of the terrorized other. Staged death pales compared to real death—the execution of a state criminal before an assembled crowd in broad daylight— because the spectacle at issue seems, at the same time, too close and too far. On the one hand, spectators feel close enough to actively engage with the “happening” unfolding before their eyes, while on the other, (they feel) too far to be, themselves, harmed or risk their lives in any way. Since they (or their own) do not run any immediate physical danger, they are absolutely free to enter the sentiment of delight at the sight of the other’s insufferable plight. The terror of the execution will be delightful to them provided that the principle of novelty is also fulfilled; if, that is, the terrorizing spectacle is new to them—as they are watching it for the first time. Physical distance from the terrifying event is a prerequisite of establishing an aesthetic stance toward it. Kant who concentrates upon the question of interest, the absence of which creates, as he contends, fertile ground for the activation of aesthetic judgment, would agree with Burke on the basic parameters of the aesthetic, and he would also point to the role of disinterestedness as the very condition of the aesthetic. In other words, in order to feel a Kantian kind of delight (for Kant the delightful is the pleasurable) the scores of spectators should be disinterested—they should have no personal interest in, prejudice against, or fear of what would look like a ritualistic kind of punishment—so that they can freely (and monstrously, I must add) appreciate aesthetically the very “form” of the procedure, on condition of course that the sight meets the demand of spectacularity through its novelty. Paradoxically, the kind of reality show that Burke invokes, the real public execution of a state criminal, is already preempted by its utterly

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theatrical characteristics, since he refers to a killing that is perpetrated on stage—a staged death, so to speak—which cannot but reinforce the feeling that the execution is probably as fake and imitative as the perfect theatrical performance that the crowd was getting ready to watch next door. Aside from rendering the real public execution into an autonomous performance such an emotional confusion or conceptual disorientation would most probably aestheticize the spectacle of horror by turning it into a fascinating or even beautiful artwork. Burke would agree with Kant on the nonconceptual nature of beauty and the nonexistence of sufficient rules that can prescribe it. However, he is rather too careful with the use of the word “beautiful” when he refers to situations that evoke terror and imply a lot of pain. So, when he brings up the issue of delight he does not want to connect it either with positive pleasure or beauty, which is indicative of his conservatism: “I say, delight, because [it is different] from actual and positive pleasure.” 54 It would be accurate, though, to claim that he does touch upon the interrelatedness between beauty and pleasure when he puts forth the idea that whatever produces positive and original pleasure has beauty “engrafted on it.” 55 Now, if beauty and pleasure run on parallel lines, why wouldn’t delight and pleasure (and eventually, the delightful and the beautiful) exhibit the same kind of behavior? After all, Burke is of the opinion that the feeling of the beautiful, not unlike the delightful, is a mechanical and almost unconscious process sneaking upon the reasoning mind. 56 In the final analysis, doesn’t “delight” presuppose or entail at least a minimum of unconscious pleasure, in which case the delightful is not strictly linked to relief from pain but to an unacknowledged feeling of the pleasure of the aesthetic and the attraction of the beautiful? 57 ART, FANTASY, AND DISASTER TOURISM IN POST-QUAKE LISBON Either through rumor or pamphlet reading, the fascination that the natural disaster exerted on the minds of European citizens was without precedent: It “became the subject of commentaries, cautionary tales, speculation, and heated debate in churches, salons, universities, civil institutions, and the street” 58 ; “[t]he coffee houses hummed. One minute it was said that every merchant of the English Factory had lost everything . . . [and] one story which did the rounds even claimed that all of Lisbon was under water.” 59 At first, the thing was thought too improbable to be true. In fact, it was thought a downright lie. The Caledonian Mercury wrote that it all was a fabrication for which France was responsible, while Samuel Johnson refused, at first, to give any credibility to the circulating rumors as he was of the opinion that before the dust settled all oral or written descriptions would inevitably give way to sheer speculation and the hu-

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man propensity for exaggeration and fictitiousness. 60 He did have a point, though, insofar as lots of newspapers immediately took to sensational and literary reporting to account for an incident that felt just as sensational, un-prosaic, and unearthly. Thus, anonymous reports, family letters, and allegedly “authentic” eyewitness accounts were tampered with to live up to the expectations of the disaster-mongering public, while other supposedly personal stories or experiences that went into press turned out to be completely made up. The mixture of reality and fiction in the middle-of-the-century media was embodied by the circulation of “event-reports,” a literary genre interested in all kinds of disasters and uncommon incidents written almost on impulse and employing a rather emotional tone. The huge success of those “typically distorted” reports can be put down to “the power of the message behind them” as well as “the beliefs, feelings and world view of most eighteenth-century readers.” 61 Almost all information coming from Lisbon shortly after the earthquake capitalized on feeling and the power of language to engage Europeans emotionally by calling attention to an event that was beyond their wildest imaginations. For imagination to be pricked, what was needed did not just include suggestive and metaphoric words that appealed to the reading public’s fantasies but also visual evidence of the catastrophe. People, that is, needed to see for themselves what exactly had happened in that European corner which was so close to their own neighborhoods. Images of a shattered Lisbon ranged from woodcuts and engravings based on previous drawings to detailed paintings by prominent European artists such as Messrs Paris or Miguel Tiberio Pedegache. Such artistic representations were the exact analogue of journalistic and literary writings on the event—for instance, the “event-reports” or newspaper articles—insofar as they constituted, to a great extent, a fusion of fictional elements and reality. Especially those produced anonymously tended to emphasize the horror of the disaster in its “nowness” by means of demonstrating the terrorizing tsunami as real eyewitnesses would have seen it and distant spectators envisioned it—a monstrous singularity attacking humanity in the guise of inanimate nature, which had turned fully animate for the occasion. Contrary to some relatively accurate representations of Lisbon created in the immediate aftermath of the natural catastrophe, which focused on the damage wrought upon the buildings and the architectural structure of the city, fantastic images of Lisbon during and right after the terrible incident underscored the psychological effects of the disaster upon ordinary Lisboans’ minds, the terror that was written all over their faces at those moments, as well as their utter inability to make any sense of what was happening—hands thrown up toward the sky in distress. 62 In a sense, those imaginative/imaginary illustrations of the Portuguese capital with its residents could do more justice to the reality of horror experi-

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enced on that day than sober and accurate representations of the architectural environment. The reason is that it was not mainly the buildings that suffered; real people did, and imaginary illustrations bore witness to that suffering. So, the real event was essentially “speaking” the same chaotic—verging on the apocalyptic—language as that of many imaginary representations. Without doubt, it took artistic imagination to conjure the irrational and unimaginable, while distant European subjects confronted with those fanciful images would have to activate their aesthetic capabilities and instincts in order to capture the magnitude of the disaster. Most probably, they would feel overwhelmed by Nature’s terrorizing might and a sense of the sublime would be evoked within their souls before they could manage to rise above the terrifying aspect of natural or Godly power, thus asserting their own freedom from the terrorism of nature while empathizing with fellow humans that were directly affected. Simultaneously, however, a case could be made also for the latency of the feeling of the beautiful before a shocking, but distant, disaster, in terms of the inexplicable and immoral delight felt by spectators who remotely took to aesthetically appreciating representations of something that up to then had existed only in their imaginations. As I argue, it was precisely the feeling of the beautiful or delightful, in its Burkean as well as Kantian sense, which permeated the minds of a number of foreigners rushing (from Britain, France, Italy, and elsewhere) to post-quake Lisbon to encounter their morally forbidden wishes headon. That group of people might easily be called disaster tourists insofar as they went on Grand Tours through Southern Europe and, while passing through Portugal, sought to confront the real disaster that they had only heard of or witnessed through artistic, literary, and journalistic representations. What they wanted to see was not the strenuous efforts to rebuild Lisbon, but rather the effects of the threefold debacle of earth, sea, and fire. What they wanted, in a word, was ruins. Lisbon could certainly deliver ruins, but not the sort of ancient ones that had worn slowly over time . . . [since its] wasted landscape was far more immediate and sinister [because] its demise had come on not slowly . . . but rather in a single day [thus producing] only horror [rather than] longing for a lost golden age. The sight of Lisbon [was] a living scene of dystopia. 63

If ancient ruins betray the slow and natural decay of a grand civilization of the distant past, Lisbon’s rubble constitutes the material and cultural remains of a sinister present whose immediacy and abruptness mock the usual processes of history making and culture formation. Lisbon was turned into an “ancient monument” overnight through an instantaneous irruption of nature’s destructive force into the city’s normal routine. Foreign travelers, then, would not swarm to Portugal to admire the glori-

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ousness of its past—that would be an ordinary act of art appreciation— but they would come to appreciate the uncanny view of a horrifying nowness making them feel as if they were actively taking part in watershed events that determined the fate of the world. That feeling broke with conventional subjective appraisals of commonplace beauty (such as admiring the “obvious” beauty of ancient ruins) by offering alternative ways of aesthetic appreciation and new modes of experiencing the beautiful in the face of destruction and tragedy. Foreigners had come to witness something that they had not seen before—unconventional, non-obvious beauty arising from novel ruins— and Lisbon met the criteria: “[F]rom a very indifferent city, Lisbon is become one of the most extraordinary ruins in the world.” 64 “Extraordinariness” has the word “beauty” engrafted on it, as Burke would say, not in the sense that everything extraordinary is beautiful but in the sense that, on the one hand, everything beautiful is extraordinary, while on the other, extraordinary things are pleasurably and delightfully so (extraordinary) even if they have a bearing on destruction, violence and terror; in some cases, on condition that they bear on other people’s terror and destruction. Burke is more revealing about such a curious sentiment: We delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed. This noble capital, the pride of England and of Europe, I believe no man is so strangely wicked as to desire to see destroyed by a conflagration or an earthquake, though he should be removed himself to the greatest distance from the danger. But suppose such a fatal accident to have happened, what numbers from all parts would croud (sic) to behold the ruins, and amongst them many who would have been content never to have seen London in its glory? 65

The Lisbon earthquake looms large in Burke’s horizon, although he never mentions it directly. In the excerpt above, he has substituted London for Lisbon to render the impact, or appeal, of such a catastrophe more dramatic in the eyes of his fellow citizens. He posits that whereas one would have to be evil to contemplate London’s destruction, to actually see such a dreadful thing happening would generate in outsiders and remote spectators a sentiment of delight as well as an ambivalent fascination which would cause them to yearn to visit the English capital so as to “behold” its ruins, even if they had had no desire to see it . . . standing in the first place. The delight to which Burke refers hinges upon people’s unconscious and amoral desire (still, a desire that somehow pertains to the greatest moral law, namely, the “unwritten law”) to witness the thunderous fall of a magnificent city or a great European commercial center, a wish that derives precisely from the realization that such a possibility is hardly probable. It is a sense of the impossible—the extraordinary likelihood of a great political power’s (unlikely) destruction—that would ex-

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cite distant observers’ imagination so terribly as to make them feel exhilarated at the slightest possibility of such a development. This is a morally charged interpretation associated with political and religious assumptions regarding London (or any other imperial, and hence “immoral,” power) as a city inevitably heading for its own doomsday that would supposedly purge it of its inherent sinfulness. Furthermore, delight in the other’s catastrophe is associated with the secret thought that what befalls one cannot befall another; in other words, one feels relieved by the fact that disaster has chosen to strike at somebody else and this feeling gets presented as sensitivity to, or masked as sincere empathy toward, real sufferers. Burke’s insights might also be seen from a clearly aesthetic viewpoint. Should London suffer a calamity of biblical proportions, he seems to insinuate, it would automatically be transformed into a much more interesting city, one that would actually be able to offer something new and authentic to its visitors: a nightmarish vision of its ever-glorious stature. Picking up from Burke, Kant could have argued that visitors of Lisbon, like those of London, would indulge into the new, uncanny, version of the city even if they had never known the “old” one. Arguably, they would take to an aesthetic judgment of the destroyed capital without entangling themselves in a priori rules as to the moral value of their viewpoints. Kant’s insight that determinant or moral judgment, unlike the reflective or aesthetic one, is not an impartial kind of judgment may well apply to the case at hand. If we are convinced of the Burkean idea of delight in the face of horror, then we must accept that this feeling, which goes largely unacknowledged, does not reside at the realm of determinant judgment; rather, it hinges upon an aesthetic stance toward novelty and the authentic which is independent of moral injunctions dictating, for example, that it would be completely immoral for people visiting Lisbon in the aftermath of the catastrophe not to focus clearly upon its material, ethical or religious consequences. Yet tourism, even during the early phases of the Enlightenment, was focused upon as an aesthetic target. Almost by definition, tourists have aesthetic pleasure at the center of their attention. Pleasure is actually nothing but . . . the promise of it; a Grand Tour’s success depended on whether the promise or imperative of pleasure was fulfilled, an imperative inextricably bound up with the degree in which a tourist’s sense of reality was affirmed or disrupted. In other words, tourists are there to evaluate the truthfulness and accuracy of the writings about an ancient monument or disaster that prompted them to pay the respective visit in the first place. Foreign travelers entering Lisbon wished to decide for themselves how real the earthquake was as well as whether it was as disastrous for its residents as European newspapers, pamphlets, and Voltaire’s poem and novella on the subject had initially advertized. The tourist, that is, abides

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by the principle of authenticity which, in the case at hand, entails her determination to see real relics and palpable ruins as evidence proving that the stories are authentic. The aesthetic appeal of ruins is largely connected with the almost cannibalistic satisfaction that the tourist gets from realizing that the real thing “delivered,” that the actual images correspond fully with the imagined pictures of catastrophe. To put it in a Kantian terminology, if there exists no heterogeneity between the concept “Lisbon Terror” and the real scenes encountered in the city—which constitute the “imaginative examples” of the aforementioned concept—there will emerge in the tourist’s mind a vision of harmony between what she had imagined and what she actually witnessed: a true feeling of the beautiful. Under these circumstances, the tourist allows herself to be aesthetically absorbed or magically allured by the real horror unfolding before her. It is also the privileged position from which she gazes at that horror that may transform it into a beautiful and visually compelling sight or object. One of the very first disaster tourists arriving in Lisbon a few weeks after the earthquake was John Dobson who came from Britain with his friend George Lucy in search for a better climate, or allegedly for fun, despite all the rumors about the unbearable condition of Lisboans and the capital at large. In a letter to his uncle from Lisbon, Dobson describes the pandemonium by offering fragmented snapshots of the terrifying incident consecutively positioned in his account in such a way as to give off an air of realism tinged with shots of the uncanny and surreal: I would now say something of the city of Lisbon . . . if words could paint the misery which has oppress’d it: an earthquake of seven minutes began the desolation . . . [t]he opera house . . . the custom house, the royal palace, and all the houses of the English merchants are demolished . . . [t]he Portuguese ran with immediate haste to their churches, which fell first, and buried near twenty thousand people in one confus’d heap of rubbish . . . [while] the Spanish Minister and his family were swallow’d up alive in their coach. 66

Perhaps the terrorist manifestations of the earth’s behavior—causing people to be “swallow’d up alive”—recorded in Dobson’s letter managed to arouse Charles Dickens’s curiosity as well as stimulate his aesthetic sensibilities when, in an article published in the Household Words journal in 1858, he estimated that the earthquake and tsunami had “swallowed at one gulp forty thousand people (my emphasis).” He went on describing how, while in Lisbon, he visualized himself experiencing the 1755 earthquake from up close: As I looked, I fell into a reverie in my chair in the Braganca balcony. Napier’s Peninsular War dropping from my hand, I imagine myself, that November morning, on that safe roof-top watching that tranquil city. Suddenly, the houses all around me began to roll and tremble like

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a stormy sea. . . . [T]he floors fell with the shake of cannons. The groans and cries of a great battle were round me. I could hear the sea dashing on the quays, and rising to swallow what the earthquake had left. . . . [S]creaming crowds, running thickly, hither and thither, like sheep when the doors of the red slaughter-house are closed. 67

In his reverie, the narrator blends the war terminology from Napier’s book with expressions of physical nature’s rage, thus assigning radical agency to the earthquake—”the shake of cannons,” “cries of a great battle.” The earth is shown to be in a belligerent mood, almost as if it had just declared war on humanity. In fact, the warfare has begun without even a war having been declared officially: a strike of physical terrorism at the heart of human civilization. The ostensibly evil nature of that strike is embodied in the anthropomorphic images of the “swallowing” sea and the clamoring quake taking turns terrorizing the astonished crowds. The key point of the excerpt, however, is that all this panorama of battle and terrorism is aestheticized by the voyeuristic position of the viewer who watches “that tranquil city” from a “safe roof-top.” As we already know, the basis for aesthetic appreciation is, precisely, safety, that vantage-point from which the dispassionate external observer may freely pass judgment upon a situation irrespective of prejudice or morality; a judgment that is grounded upon one’s own instinct or taste concerning the object of attention. Dickens revisits the horror of the threefold disaster by turning himself into the ideal spectator who is, simultaneously, part of the theater of catastrophe but also outside the horrific scenes. In a way, he is complicit in the elements’ terrorist conspiracy insofar as he is bearing witness to the excruciating tragedy but without participating in the violence entailed by it—he is not harmed by what he sees—and he is not looking away either. The imaginary reliving of the earthquake from a privileged standpoint leads inevitably to its transformation into an object of pleasure and real delight for the observer who cannot help gazing at the images of destruction and who is called upon to treat those images as though they were art—both, in the sense of fictionality as well as beauty. The disaster tourist (a category which might include Dickens on account of his aesthetic vision of 1755 Lisbon) derives pleasure from the act of re-enacting the momentary passage from complete tranquility to total disruption, the liminal point between serenity and sudden chaos. Readers of disaster tourist testimonies, too (becoming spectators themselves, in a way), are called upon to appreciate aesthetically the instantaneous and irrational shift toward terror by expressing their horror, which is the moral thing to do, and, at the same time, acknowledging unconsciously the visual powerfulness of that shift. The readers of the excerpt from Household Words witness the fascination exerted upon the narrator by the aesthetic forcefulness of suddenness: “Suddenly, the houses all around me began to roll.” This “suddenly” encapsulates the narrative contrast

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between nothingness and “somethingness” which converts the narration into a beautiful one, while, at the same time, placing both the narrator and the reader in a pleasurable position: right at the center of the action where an occurrence worthy of attention is about to take place. The aforementioned “rupture” could be seen also as its opposite, namely as some kind of bridge between “then” and “now.” More specifically, the message that often underlies the aesthetic treatment of catastrophe by distant spectators and disaster tourists is that the disaster “could happen as we speak.” Indeed, to make the disaster more appealing to the senses and more dramatic, one needs to bring it closer to the reality of the audience/spectator. Giuseppe Baretti, an Italian writer who spent many years in England, befriending, amongst others, Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding, was going back home to Genoa in September 1760. On the way, he stopped at Lisbon for a week. He was petrified at what he saw: My whole frame was shaking as I ascended this and that heap of rubbish. Who knows, thought I, but I stand now directly over some mangled body that was suddenly buried under this heap! Some beautiful woman! Some helpless infant! A whole family perhaps! Then I came in sight of a ruined church. Consider its walls giving way! The roof and cupola sinking at once, and crushing hundreds of thousands of all ages, of all ranks, of all conditions! This was convent . . . this was a college . . . a hospital! Reflect on whole communities lost in an instant! The dreadful idea comes round and round with irresistible intrusion. 68

Baretti shows how overwhelmed he feels with the magnitude of the catastrophe. Nonetheless, the fact that he is trying to make the indescribable picture presentable or even attractive for his reader should not go unnoticed. Five years after the earthquake Lisbon was in a mess and the ghastly memories were still fresh. Baretti is not just paying respects to the dead but is going well beyond stereotypical lamentation. On an imaginary level, he is making connection with the people lost by virtually “trampling” on them—”I stand now directly over some mangled body”—so as to make perceptible the feeling that it was not just “crowds” that were crushed; those were real people—a “beautiful woman” or a “helpless infant.” In his imagination, he is recreating the disaster by reproducing details of bloody scenes of intolerable pain so that one can reflect on the sheer brutality involved. What is more, he seems willing to bridge the gap between that horrific day of the past and his own time by pointing to the common fate shared by different generations. Baretti and his friends, that is, are equally vulnerable to destruction by a natural disaster—”this could happen to us,” he seems to insinuate—and one should not just try to understand this intellectually but also comprehend it emotionally by means of the senses. 69 This synaesthetic “timeloop,” despite bringing eerily the moment of the disaster closer to the

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reader, paradoxically defamiliarizes the disaster by unveiling its real face as a horrifying singularity that cannot be reduced to simple phrases of contrition. Baretti, above all, lays bare the “disaster touristic” aspects of his thought by addressing that single moment that separates Lisbon into a before and an after: “whole communities lost in an instant!” Strange though it may sound, an aesthetic presentation of catastrophe requires the mythical “annihilation” of entire communities in a single instant, indeed. And conversely, exposure to the possibility of singular destruction requires an aesthetic rendering of the catastrophic moment. The thing with (narratives or images of) catastrophes that are invested with the element of the sudden or instantaneous is that, on the one hand, they present aestheticized and fictionalized versions of real historical occurrences—disasters are hardly “sudden” in the literal sense—while on the other, they constitute attempts to remove the barrier between the spectator and the catastrophic but far-off “spectacle” thereby calling attention to the possibility that the spectator is no longer able to make a judgment from a safe position. The disaster tourist is enthralled by the idea that a sudden catastrophe could erupt again at any point in the future affecting her own life as well. The myth of catastrophic suddenness (or sudden catastrophe) alludes to the tourist’s fascination not only with witnessing catastrophe but also with continuously reproducing it in her mind in an aesthetic mode. If that is accurate, doesn’t it mean that we may be envious of what the real witness saw but we, as outsiders, unfortunately did not? Do we not feel entitled to tasting the same amount of terrible, but real, beauty associated with the gruesome but enticing (because uncommon) possibility of utter destruction occurring within a single moment? As Baretti points out, “[t]he dreadful idea comes round and round with irresistible intrusion.” 70 The figure of the disaster tourist, as it emerged after the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami, is inextricable from the deep-seated need to witness the real and the authentic. It is certain that what travelers and tourists came to see in the aftermath of the catastrophe was not the art and monuments of the city, nor what was left of them. They had come to watch extraordinary ruins, as we have clearly stated. If a typical tourist yearns for the extraordinary that separates her from the ordinariness and routine of her daily life “back home,” the disaster tourist wants to be taken in by the extraordinarily disastrous or destroyed that is also real rather than artistic or fictional. According to Debbie Lisle, sites of atrocity “are coveted because they are the only places left which haven’t been commodified and turned into a spectacle. In effect, the only ‘real’ thing anymore, the only thing that can be differentiated from the surrounding spectacle, is catastrophe. Everything else is mediated, simulated, banal.” 71 Lisle addresses the extent to which tourism nowadays has strayed from the ordinary and harmless sight-seeing experience and moved on to more demanding tasks related to the authenticity or not of the touristic sight. Allegedly, it

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is only catastrophic instances such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York that, in their sheer violence and brutality, give rise to a sense of reality and non-mediatedness. Interestingly, “despite a worldwide downturn in tourism” in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, soon there emerged an increasing number of travelers craving to see with their own eyes the destruction at Ground Zero, especially after the construction of a public viewing platform nearby in Lower Manhattan serving to witness the scene of horror with absolute safety. 72 At this point, what comes to our mind is Burke’s insight, discussed earlier, regarding the fantastic destruction of London by an earthquake. It is highly likely that many of the visitors travelling to post-9/11 New York to witness the disaster (as well as check whether it actually happened) had not visited the city before. In fact, they might not even have expressed the wish to see it and admire its sights prior to the catastrophe. Through this lens, it would not be implausible to support that it was precisely the terrifying catastrophe that retrospectively turned New York into a fascinating and beautiful location. One could make a similar case with the Lisbon earthquake. For the traveler on a Grand Tour during the Enlightenment, the fantasy of a shattered Lisbon must have felt like “the real thing.” The extraordinary ruins at which the disaster tourist aspired to gaze might have been nothing like true ancient ruins belonging to a great civilization of the past, but they appealed to the human eye as palpable evidence of the chaotic but fascinating trajectory that the world may inexplicably follow at any given moment in time. Apart from being a great commercial and cosmopolitan center, Lisbon was now also a beautiful site of devastation, the “flagship” of the reign of death. Death and violence had always encompassed Lisbon in European popular imagination, even before the earthquake. The Inquisition established in the capital in the 1530s was a cause of absolute terror for the residents of the city, both Portuguese and foreign ones. British, Protestant, subjects living in Lisbon for professional reasons were equally alarmed by the fierceness of the Catholic authorities, despite some laxity in their treatment due to the commercial, financial, and military agreements between England and Portugal (which dated back to the 1380s). It is said that approximately forty-five thousand people were interrogated and terrorized by the Inquisition in one century alone. 73 Such a “culture” of agonizing terror and death horrified, stunned as well as fascinated distant spectators and future travelers who would look to the attractively morbid ambience of Lisbon for fulfilling their need to witness the authentic in the form of the catastrophic and the deadly. The tourists of the nineteenth-century could easily attest to the fact that the city of Lisbon still gave off an air of inhumanity, desolation, cruelty, and terror despite the destruction of the main Inquisition building by the 1755 earthquake. The feeling of terror was intensified by the very realization that the chambers of torture used by the Catholic authorities were still there a century

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later, lying intact underneath the feet of unsuspecting and care-free visitors, ready to spread horror and inflict intolerable pain once more if called upon. The uncomfortable notion of the ominous presence of death creeping up from the underground generated awe in the tourist’s mind as well as an inexplicable feeling of delight and pleasure arising from the, now, harmless proximity and innocuousness of pain: “[H]ere, underneath the very spot on which we now stand, are the dungeons of the Inquisition.” There was, at these words, a general start amongst his auditors; but the next moment they drew closer to him, eager to hear more. “They are said to exist no longer,” resumed Mr. Grey, “and I thank God that there is reason to believe the assertion true; but it must always be a melancholy reflection, that while all above was light and life, and liberty and enjoyment, scenes were acted below too fearful to dwell upon.” 74

This description was allegedly given by a member of a British family— the Greys—that had stayed in Portugal for three years during the first half of the nineteenth century. The tourists (“auditors”) were astounded to learn that they were actually standing on top of the former dungeons of the Inquisition, which produced in them a delightful horror and a Burkean sense of the sublime, insofar as they sensed a mixture of pain and pleasure: pain (and terror), because their imagination irrationally took over from their power of reasoning, making them feel that they were physically in danger themselves, although there had elapsed almost fifty years since the dungeons were last used; pleasure (and, more importantly, delight) because they instantly realized that they were not really at risk: the rather remote danger was delightful.” 75 Burke explicates the concept of “delightful horror” by contending that if pain does not lead to straightforward violence and the terror felt is not owing to a real imminent danger, then a certain degree of delight might be produced, or rather, some sort of delightful horror shot through with terror. Terror’s object, adds Burke, is the sublime whose culmination is called astonishment. 76 Burke here differentiates delight from (positive) pleasure and clearly connects delightful terror with the feeling of the sublime. Whereas pleasure seems indolent, delight enlivens in us a sense of strength which is probably associated with the feeling of superiority to and independence from an external power of degradation and subjection. I am not interested in delightful horror as sublime—this connection has already been made by critics and philosophers—but, rather, as potentially opening up a conceptual and emotive space for realizing the amoral power of the feeling of beauty before terrorizing instances. The minute the Lisbon tourists “started” at the single thought of subjecting themselves to the torturous habits of the Inquisition, they suddenly “drew closer,” “eager

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to hear more,” yearning to mentally and imaginarily place themselves in the shoes of the individuals that really suffered in the past. But didn’t the “delightful terror” they felt before the sublimity of the Inquisition turn eventually into pleasure at the image of that sublime power decaying into a mere museum exhibit? Didn’t the aestheticization of past terror—the rendering of sublimity into an aesthetic, enframed, objecthood—convert it into an object of sheer fascination and positive pleasure, even if that fascination derived partly from the engaging voice of the tourists’ guide? However absolute Burke is in his insistence that delightful horror and pleasure are unconnected, the subtext of some of his articulations allows for considering not only the possibility of pleasure at the sight of horror but, even more intriguingly, the activation of a sense of beauty at the sight of it. We have already established that Burke expresses the view that beauty is “engrafted” on whatever produces positive and original pleasure. Elsewhere, we have seen that he places great emphasis on the idea that beauty is not a product of a reasoning mind since it strikes us without any reason or cause. Thus it must be concluded that beauty is some quality that functions mechanically upon the mind through the work of the senses. 77 The idea that just about anything around us could give rise to a sense of the beautiful, however dreadful that might sound (given that beauty is a mechanical feeling that almost swoops in on us unexpectedly and, at times, immorally), combined with the insight that beauty could not be further from the idea of custom may lead one to legitimately equate the spontaneous individual delight with catastrophe with the unexpectedness as well as novelty of beauty. 78 After all, as Burke says, the beautiful strikes us as much by its newness as the deformed. 79 If the deformed, which can be deemed beautiful, is exemplified by the ethically and materially catastrophic—the torture chambers and the Lisbon earthquake, respectively—then, Burke’s notion of delight before catastrophe should not be restricted to the feeling of relief but extended also to the morally forbidden aesthetic of the beautiful. The disaster tourists pondering over the prisoners’ plight in the secret underground chambers of the Inquisition may indeed have felt an immoral but instinctual exhilaration at witnessing something unimaginably horrific, which, though, constituted a novel, hence aesthetically appealing experience for them. The aesthetic appeal of the images of imprisonment bore partly on the visitors’ realization that the “spectacle” before them was real—and it could just as well have been them locked up in those prisons—and partly on the relieving assumption that it had no real effects upon them. Burke and Kant share similar views concerning the subjective feeling of the beautiful. Both think that it is irrational, non-conceptual, mechanical, and, by extension, amoral and spontaneous: Beauty arises at the very moment that it is announced, as has been enticingly stated. 80 When it comes to the sublime, however, the two thinkers deviate from each other, at least in theory. While Burke claims (at times against the grain of his

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own logic) that the sublime is a negative experience that cannot be rationalized or overcome (which theoretically entails that it is by no means a positive or communicable experience), Kant implies that the sublime announces its arrival at the very moment of its being overpowered: The sublime in Kant is the resistance against that which had been previously considered sublime: rather than considering the sublime the experience of being overpowered, the sublime is “our ability to resist” the overpowering of the self. According to Kant the sublime, like the beautiful, is a feeling of pleasure, and a judgment about the sublime is an aesthetic judgment that is reflective and disinterested. . . . [The deprivation of the freedom of imagination during the experience of the sublime] becomes sublime insofar as it calls forth a higher counterforce within us. 81

In plain terms, the sublime, for him, is a positive affirmation of the individual’s freedom to rise above the . . . sublime and reassert her superiority over nature’s terror. However, by reaffirming her independence from it the individual establishes some kind of distance from the terrifying event or object and thereby inevitably aestheticizes it by rendering it, in a way, into a beautiful image. If both the beautiful and the sublime are feelings of pleasure for Kant (but not for Burke) and the judgments about them are aesthetic and disinterested, it may follow that on the conceptual level they are far more similar to each other than one would be willing to admit. For instance, the Kantian non-concept of the beautiful may equally inhere in both terms. “[S]ublime eruptions like the French Revolution,” in Terry Eagleton’s view, “could be admired as long as they were aestheticized, contemplated from a secure distance,” which basically means that we need to turn the sublime into a “beautiful” object or spectacle in order to recognize it as sublime. 82 To pass a disinterested judgment upon the French Revolution (or even to express an admiration for it, as Kant did) one has to reflect upon it aesthetically by placing it at a distance from oneself and, therefore, acknowledging its enticing form. Indeed, Kant’s notion of the sublime contains real vestiges of the beautiful. If we were to judge the disaster tourists’ experiences and sentiments in Lisbon in terms of the two categories, the sublime and the beautiful, we might arrive at the conclusion that it was the possibility of encountering the former (or, rather, sensing it in themselves subjectively) that tempted them to travel to post-quake Lisbon but, at the same time, it was through the latter—the beautiful—that that very possibility could ever be approximated. Since the sublime, in its Burkean sense, is constituted by terror as the most extreme and painful aesthetic experience that could ever be felt, it would unconsciously be an object of sheer attraction for the tourists, who “naturally” craved for some degree of familiarity with the authentically real (albeit at one remove from it, namely as representation) whether that be the horrific reality of torture in the pre-quake Lisbon

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dungeons, the unthinkable pain under the rubble of the shattered buildings in post-quake Lisbon, or even the tremendous shock at the very instant of the unprecedented event. Part of their delight would derive, of course, from their relief that they cannot be harmed by the horrors of the past. Another big part of that delight, however, was “Kantian” insofar as it verged upon a simulation of the original sensation of the sublime and its subsequent transformation into an enticing object of beauty. In this light, the Lisbon misery could only be experienced retroactively by the foreign travelers as an aesthetic product bearing the attributes of the enthralling and the beautiful. CATASTROPHISM: REVISITING THE EARTHQUAKE AS SHOW BUSINESS The further away we moved chronologically from the day of the terrible event the more attractive and fascinating became the historical and artistic reproductions or commemorations of it across the continent. In fact, a hundred years after the 1755 earthquake, the Lisbon horror had turned into a major touristic attraction in theme parks and amusement centers in England and other European countries. The transference of the astonishingly real from the original “venue” (the city of Lisbon) to other Western locations marked the mutation of the earthquake from a terrible and sublime event into a beautiful, aesthetically appealing, and “pleasurable” one. The London Colosseum in Regent’s Park, now demolished, had famously presented in the 1850s the so-called “Cyclorama of Lisbon,” an exhibition of movable paintings that simulated the magnificence of Lisbon in the pre-quake era together with the terrifying moments during and after the disaster, thus making the spectators feel as if they were eyewitnesses to the whole event. The following excerpt is from a description of the “cyclorama” in Illustrated London News: We are presented with the beautiful, varied, and sublime scenery of the Tagus, the movement of which produces a peculiar feeling in the spectator. The theatre in which he sits seems like a vessel floating down the stream, and passing one object after another—the mountainous shore—the ships and vessels, the merchantmen and the xebec—the nunnery, the fort . . . the City, with its palatial . . . buildings—all doomed to sudden destruction. The last scene presents the Grand Square of Lisbon with its . . . magnificent ranges of streets . . . and other colossal decorations. . . . We next see the ships tossing upon the waves, fated to the destruction with which the lowering sky only too visibly threatens them. All is terror and despair . . . by the visitation of an inscrutable Providence, involved in one common wreck. 83

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Before introducing the visitors of the cyclorama to the ineffably shocking moments of the earthquake and tsunami, the exhibition had to acquaint them with the “sublime” beauty of the Portuguese capital prior to the catastrophe. Beauty and “ugliness,” or the aesthetically appealing and the naturally terrifying, had to somehow be brought together so that the utter irrationality of the unexpected event could be exposed. The narrative of contrast between the pleasure connected with the image of the magnificent city and the pain deriving from its almost instantaneous destruction served to heighten the effect of both, the beautiful and the horrific, by stimulating the instinct for an aesthetic appreciation of the catastrophe, and largely in the face of it. Doubtless, at least in theory, the beautiful defines itself as such through its very opposition to the ugly or repulsive, and from that perspective, the cyclorama was demonstrating that the more enticing the view of the city before, the more repulsive it became after the first day of November 1755. What is even more interesting is that, in a way, the movable paintings managed to create the feeling that the beauty and the terror were already merged into each other, as if the former were an integral part of the latter, or as though the two were interchangeable. Thus, while appreciating the natural beauty of Lisbon, the spectators were suddenly “assailed by a great ‘subterranean roar’ then plunged into pitch darkness accompanied by an ‘appalling crash.’ When light returned, a picture of ‘the horror and the desolation’ was revealed.” 84 The whole artistic performance was apparently so deftly orchestrated that the viewers felt that this was as close they could get to the actual disaster to which they were free to bear witness from the safety of London by activating at the same time their sense of vision, hearing, or even touch—in the sense that the reality they were witnessing felt palpable and material. News of terrible earthquakes and other natural phenomena had always fascinated Europe, especially England where people found something irresistible in catastrophism and the spectacularity of disaster images. A British spectator of the Cyclorama show admitted that never “was better value in fright given for money.” 85 Of course, he would never have admitted to such a thing if his own safety were at risk, because in such a case he could not have been free to appreciate the spectacle (the performance) in a disinterested way. Having ensured that they are not going to be physically or mentally harmed by what they are about to see, the spectators are free to embark upon a reflective (aesthetic) judgment of the astonishing representation of the disastrous event which, despite its horrific theme and content, likely generates in them a feeling related to the aesthetically attractive and the beautiful. Kant’s notion of reflective judgment applies, as we have already seen, an a posteriori assessment of an object, one that is based upon intuition rather than concept as well as one that respects the singularity of the object to such a degree that the implementation of predetermined and ready-made rules

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upon it is thought unsuitable as well as untenable. Reflective judgment is disinterested insofar as it passes judgment upon the object or event itself—say, the Lisbon catastrophe—without looking to its historical consequences—several thousand deaths, infrastructure destroyed, economy in unprecedented recession, and so on—for establishing a morally acceptable and sensitive attitude. In fact, such a kind of judgment is not concerned with morality or sensitivity at all but rather with the “purely” aesthetic dimension of the object under scrutiny. By “aesthetic dimension” I mean an appreciation which is based upon individual taste and (non-conceptual) aesthetic instinct. In Kantian philosophy, the aesthetic is “determined non-cognitively.” 86 On the one hand, the Cyclorama visitors seem to acknowledge the role of beauty in the artistic representation of the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself. On the other hand, in a time when art was still largely informative, such shows served also to teach, alert, or remind people of past events as well as history’s vicissitudes, and under that assumption, many artistic re-enactments or reproductions of real historical occurrences were de facto (mis)taken for the actual events that they illustrated. Why is that significant? Indeed it is, since, as we can gather from above, the Cyclorama spectators may well be taken to have reacted enthusiastically not to the fictional reproduction but the actual event in all its terribleness and horror; and what is more, they may have done it without attending to the (im)moral connotations of their reaction. At stake is what I consider, throughout this book, to hinge upon a forbidden aesthetics of the beautiful in the face of catastrophe and horror and contrary to the laws of morality. The fact that one will not acknowledge one’s secret fascination with the aesthetics of terror—in this case, the aesthetics of the “terrorism” that nature (or God) inflicted upon the people of Portugal—does not mean that one is in no position to feel intrigued by the visual powerfulness and sensory impact of the images of real historical horror, however morally reprehensive or flagrantly unjust that may sound. The key to understanding the forbidden aesthetics of the beautiful in the context of terrorist/terrorizing circumstances is the recognition that the beautiful, at least in its Kantian framework, is a disinterested quality or judgment, in the sense that it cannot be affected by any “interest” such as prejudice, moral and social convention, personal interest, and so on, since it bears on the spontaneous, the instinctual as well as on so-called individual “taste” which is non-cognitive, aesthetic, and thereby, irrational. Our delight in the beautiful is not grounded upon any concept but is immediately related to the representation of the object which is seen as beautiful. 87 The beautiful is, according to Kant, the only category of delight which is disinterested, and it is precisely this element—disinterestedness—that grants beauty the ability to move surreptitiously and “illi-

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citly” around and across emotional and mental places that it is not supposed to inhabit. NOTES 1. Sadly today, in the name of the friendship between Japan and the USA, the Japanese prefer to call—rather neutrally—the lethal strike a “disaster,” thereby exculpating the perpetrators by equating victims and victimizers. 2. We know of a survivor, or better, hibakusha (“explosion-affected person”) named Nakamura-san who confessed how “the bombing almost seemed a natural disaster— one that it had simply been her bad luck, her fate (which must be accepted), to suffer.” See John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 93. “Natural disaster” here probably means a disaster that has to be suffered “naturally” as well as stoically. 3. Check out, for instance, Susan Neiman’s fascinating book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4. J. Baudrillard, “The Violence of the Global,” trans. Francois Debrix, Ctheory (5/ 20/2003), accessed 20 November 2014. Not only can anything be criminal as Baudrillard insists, at least in contemporary society, but perhaps every catastrophe needs to be characterized as “a crime scene” so that its effects can be evaluated and the level of human responsibility regarding it properly measured. To go even deeper, “there is not such a thing as ‘a natural catastrophe’: all catastrophes are social, due to their effects.” See V. N. Izzo, “Catastrophes as Crime Scenes: Analysing the Legal Context,” Law Text Culture 13, no. 1 (2009): 108–34. 5. David McCallam, “The Terrorist Earth? Some Thoughts on Sade and Baudrillard,” French Cultural Studies 23, no. 3 (2012): 222. 6. David Alexander, “Nature’s Impartiality, Man’s Inhumanity: Reflections on Terrorism and World Crisis in a Context of Historical Disaster,” Disasters 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–9. 7. For more on the issue, see Baudrillard’s work The Transparency of Evil. Essays on Extreme Phenomena (New York: Verso, 1993), 71–72. Check out also McCallam, “The Terrorist Earth?,” 218. 8. In fact, it was John Dennis, Burke’s precursor, who first had conceptualized the feeling of the sublime in the seventeenth century. Edmund Burke was exhibiting a rather conservative kind of thought when he expressed the view that the French Revolution encapsulated the terrible experience of the sublime; unlike Kant who discerned in the Revolution the human potentiality for progress. More on that, later in the chapter. 9. J. Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature [1736] (London: George Bell, 1893). 10. C. R. Boxer, “Some Contemporary Reactions to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755,” Separata da Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, vol. XXII, 2nd series, no. 2 (1956). 11. This is an idea articulated by Susan Neiman who adds that “it takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that make civilization possible” (1). 12. It should be noted that Lisbon was, at the time, the bastion of radical Catholicism and home to Counter-Reformation’s most fanatic expression: the Holy Inquisition. Religious observance, therefore, was not only contingent upon the subject’s own individual conscience and free will but also immediately linked to the threat of the Inquisition hovering over the citizen’s head. Refusing to abide by her/his Catholic duties (such as church-going) would most certainly lead to death or permanent misery in the torture chambers and dungeons of the holy authorities. In Lisbon, the Inquisition, associated also with the so-called Society of Jesus (an extreme version of the coun-

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ter-reformation), was given permission to imprison, torture and sentence to death anyone suspected of some kind of heresy, such as Lutheranism, Judaism, sodomy, etc. 13. One cannot give an accurate estimate of casualties related to the disaster. Some speak of 20,000 people, others of 90,000. See, for instance, Francisco Xavier de Oliveira who, in A Pathetic Discourse on the present Calamities of Portugal (London, 1756) argues that “about 30,000 perished,” but “only by guess” (153); or John Murray who says that “the number of victims has been estimated as high as 80,000 and as low as 10,000,” adding that “the truth lies probably half way between the two” (Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Portugal [London, 1856], 6); or even Richard Hamblyn, “Notes from underground: Lisbon after the earthquake,” Romanticism 14, no. 2 (2008): 108–18. 14. For more information on earthquake occurrences in Portugal and other European countries, refer to Charles Davison, Great Earthquakes (London: Thomas Murby & Co., 1936). 15. An Essay on Man, Epistle 1.l, 289–94. 16. In a letter he wrote, Voltaire claimed that “[p]eople will really find it difficult to divine how the laws of motion bring about such frightful disasters in ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ A hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, suddenly crushed on our ant-hill and half of them probably perishing in expressible anguish.” (Voltaire to JeanRobert Tonchin, 24 November 1755, in Theodore Besterman, Voltaire’s Correspondence [Geneva, 1953–1965]). His most celebrated responses to the catastrophe in relation to the age of optimism, however, were two literary masterpieces: his 180-line Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, published anonymously in Paris (January 1756) and the scathing novella Candide or Optimism, published in 1759. The former constitutes a direct assault, among other things, on the idea that Lisbon was sinful, which was allegedly the cause of its fall (“Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found/Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?” [ll.23–24]); the latter, Voltaire’s signature work, is a highly intelligent satire on the fallacy of the philosophy of optimism which scandalized as well as entertained Europe when it first appeared. Optimism was also criticized in England by Samuel Johnson in “A Review of Soame Jenyns’s: A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil” (Literary Magazine [1757]), but famously endorsed by Rousseau in a letter to Voltaire on 18 August 1756 (http://www.missouri.edu/~histzut/voltaire.html). Rousseau introduced the idea of “minimum evil” and human accountability believing that the Lisbon disaster would have been much less devastating had there been a different architectural structure in the city. 17. Immanuel Kant, History and Physiography of the Most Remarkable Cases of the Earthquake which Towards the End of the Year 1755 Shook a Great Part Of the Earth (Essay One 1756). Kant, of course, witnessed the disaster from afar, from a safe distance. Had he had firsthand knowledge/experience of it, he would probably have had many reservations arguing for the necessity of earthquakes. On the other hand, there were eminent people from Portugal who had seen the tragedy from up close and who did argue for the necessity of such catastrophes. For instance, Secretary of State of the Kingdom of Portugal Carvalho, later First Marquis of Pombal, went beyond the geological benefits of earthquakes by calling attention to how “aberrations of nature are sometimes necessary because they can contribute . . . to eradicating certain systems which are determined to invade the universal Empire [and because they can] dispel the blindness of certain nations [as well as] enlighten them with the knowledge of their true interests.” From Carvalho’s Political Discourse on the Advantages Which the Kingdom of Portugal Can Obtain from the Misfortune Caused by the Memorable Earthquake of the 1st of November, 1755 [my translation] (Lisbon: National Library Foundation, Manuscript Section, I, 12, 1, #14), 1–2. 18. Svend Erik Larsen, “The Lisbon Earthquake and the Scientific Turn in Kant’s Philosophy,” European Review 14, no. 3 (July 2006): 359–67. 19. Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, A Narrative of the Earthquake and Fire of Lisbon by Antony Pereira, of the Congregation of the Oratory, an Eye-Witness Thereof, trans. from Latin (London: G. Hawkins, 1756), 4–13. His account is symptomatic of the shift from purely religious explanations to ones that took into account alternative causes asso-

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ciated with the natural world. Besides, it was six years before, in 1750, that William Stukeley published his work called The Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural and Religious in which he unified God and nature by arguing that, on the one hand, it was God (as the primary cause) who was responsible for unusual natural phenomena; but on the other, God conveyed his messages through his natural creations, therefore there have got to be natural (secondary) causes as well. 20. Figueiredo was well-known for his anti-Jesuit beliefs. Albeit a Catholic, he opposed the dehumanizing methods of the Inquisition and supported the view that a Portuguese National Church should be established—similar to the National Church in England. He even translated the Bible from Latin into Portuguese. Still, he never argued for the disengagement of Portugal from the Roman Catholic Church. His nonmilitant Catholicism is very well reflected in this excerpt to the extent that he neither dismisses God as the all-seeing and all-determining Power nor disregards the probable natural causes of the shaking of the earth. 21. This is Hannah Arendt’s term. Arendt uses the almost Kantian notion of “enlarged mentality” to signify an empathic-like state which enables an individual to think and feel as if she were in the place of another. To do that, according to Arendt, an individual has to exercise her faculty of imagination rather than reasoning. For her political philosophy, Arendt drew immensely upon Kant’s ideas—elaborated upon in The Critique of Judgement—concerning the relationship between aesthetics and personal judgment. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. The book was originally published in 1971. 22. Letter from Richard Wolfall to James Parsons, 18 November 1755, from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 49 (1755–1756): 402–7. 23. Ian McEwan, “Only Love and Then Oblivion: Love Was All They Had to Set Against Their Murderers,” Guardian, September 15, 2001. 24. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 257. 25. A. Braddock, “Letter to the Revd. Dr. George Sandby dated 13 November 1755,” in Charles Davy, Letters Addressed Chiefly to a Young Gentleman upon Subjects of Literature, Vol. II (London, 1787), 12–60. 26. Anonymous, An Account by an Eyewitness of the Lisbon Earthquake of November 1, 1755 (Lisbon: British Historical Society of Portugal, 1985), 10. 27. E. J. Pereira, “The Great Earthquake of Lisbon,” in Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan, vol. 12 (1888): 5–19. 28. Letter, November 19, 1755, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. XXV (December 1755): 561. 29. Letter, November 4, 1755, Whitehall Evening Post, December 2, 1755. 30. Lisbon may have been packed with churches at the time of the earthquake, still, its residents were considered by the Catholic authorities as wallowing in sin, luxury and debauchery. Apparently, Lisboans were just not Catholic enough and had to be punished with an earthquake because of their immorality, at least in the Inquisition’s view. When the cataclysmic event occurred, the church did nothing to mitigate the anguish of the panic-stricken crowds. On the contrary, it advised them to repent for their sins and renounce their heretic (that is, crypto-protestant) selves more intensely so as to appease God’s wrath. An Italian Jesuit named Gabriel Malagrida, brought to Lisbon as confessor to the king a few years before the disaster, published a pamphlet entitled An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake, fanatically insisting that it was God that wreaked havoc on Lisbon, adding that to say that there was a natural cause would be a scandal, as in that case there would be no need to regret our sins and show our gratitude to the Almighty. The title of the pamphlet in the original is Juizo da verdadeira causa do terramoto (Lisbon: 1756). Of course, for European Protestantism, on the other hand, Lisbon got what it deserved for precisely its extreme Catholicism, its idolatry, as well as the bloody Inquisition. See for example John Wesley’s work entitled Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon (London: 1755), in which the author—and founder of Methodism—claims that blood was spilled on Lisbon’s ground as casually as water, and someone had to be held accountable for that. In

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mid-eighteenth-century Europe, earthquakes were still taken to constitute proof of God’s will to interfere with the world which, after all, He had created. In Protestant England, the Lisbon earthquake aroused great consternation among the people as they had already experienced earthquakes themselves—notably, the London tremors of 1750—and many of them were familiar with religious lectures establishing connection between natural catastrophes and divine justice. For instance, William Stukeley, in a lecture to the Royal Society, did declare that “of all the great and public calamities which affect us mortals, [earthquakes] claim the first title to the name of warnings and judgments” quoted in Edward Paice, Wrath of God (London: Quercus, 2008), 163. 31. Joanna Bourke, “Pain: Metaphor, Body, and Culture in Anglo-American Societies between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18, no. 4 (2014): 475–98. Important book-length studies that have analyzed the work of metaphor in human language and narrative are, amidst others, George Lakoff, and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Ray W. G. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 32. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 55. 33. Shrady, The Last Day. Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 18. Heretofore cited as The Last Day. Shrady is a writer and a journalist, and his reference to a “nightmarish” version of the city could, in fact, be viewed as an example of journalistic/scientific narrative relapsing into figurative, apocalyptic language. 34. See the two compilations of eyewitness accounts published by The British Historical Society of Portugal: The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (Lisbon: 1987), and An account by an eyewitness of the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755 (Lisbon: 1985). 35. For instance, Samuel Pepys had affirmed that Lisbon was “a very poor and dirty place” (Diary of Samuel Pepys, 17 October 1661, quoted also in Edward Paice, 30). Moreover, Henry Fielding, in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon published after his death, described the Portuguese capital as the nastiest city in the world. Fielding died in Lisbon a few months before the earthquake. 36. Shrady, The Last Day, 117. 37. Suvendrini Perera, “Torturous dialogues: Geographies of trauma and spaces of exception,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 31–45. 38. “November 1755,” 521. 39. Adorno has unlocked modernity’s panorama of destruction by calling attention to a certain kind of “phantasmagoria” that “comes into being when under the constraints of its own limitations, modernity’s latest products come close to the archaic. [Thus] every step forward is at the same time a step into the remote past” (In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone [London: New Left Books, 1981], 31). Adorno therefore touches upon panorama and phantasmagoria as sites of convergence of the futuristic and the archaic or primeval. In this light, in its attempt to yield an authentic description of the new (catastrophe), human language tends to reach back onto the very old and immemorial. 40. Sharon Sliwinski, “The Aesthetics of Human Rights,” Culture, Theory and Critique 50, no. 1 (2009): 23–39. 41. Sliwinski appears to believe that we are not born with the feeling that the other has rights; rather, we need to cultivate that feeling through judgment as well as real emotional contact with the other. The idea about the cultural/social “construction,” so to speak, of sincere empathy and respect toward the others is largely based, as far as Lisbon sufferers are concerned, upon the work Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (cited also by Sliwinski), published a few years after the earthquake, in which he suggests that only by seeing the other’s misfortune can our moral sensibility be exercised and heightened. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] (Mineola: Dover, 2006). 42. Sliwinski, “The Aesthetics of Human Rights,” 32.

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43. Allen Feldman, “On the Actuarial Gaze,” Cultural Studies, 19, no. 2 (2005): 203–26. 44. The Lure of the Sea, The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 236. 45. Anonymous, An account by an Eyewitness of the Lisbon Earthquake of November 1, 1755 (Lisbon: British Historical Society of Portugal, 1985), 10–11. 46. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 41. 47. Ibid., 29. 48. This is clearly stated in part III, section 5, page 93 of A Philosophical Enquiry. We have already seen that Kant, too, endorses the view that the feeling of the beautiful is bound up with unordinary things or views. 49. Ibid., 43. 50. Ibid., 42. 51. Ibid., 43. 52. Ibid., 43. 53. Ibid., 43. 54. Ibid., 122. 55. Ibid., 119. 56. Burke concedes that the feeling of delight before instances of terror and pain of the other is mixed with a certain kind of uneasiness, implying that one cannot help having that feeling, despite its inherent immorality (43). 57. Kant was much more willing to address the delightful through the lens of the beautiful, than Burke. In fact he viewed the beautiful as one of the three categories of delight—the other two being the agreeable and the good. For him, the beautiful is the only disinterested kind of delight. 58. Shrady, The Last Day, 117. 59. Paice, Wrath of God, 149. 60. A month after the catastrophe, The Caledonian Mercury published letters affirming that “the whole Story was invented at Paris, to disconcert the London Merchants, and that by this time it is looked upon there as a Piece of French Finesse” (no. 5302, December 2, 1755). Samuel Johnson could not believe the descriptions coming from Lisbon “for six months at least”: “I did think that story too dreadful to be credited, and can hardly yet persuade myself that it was true to the full extent we all of us have heard” (Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. [London, 1786]). Obviously, for Johnson verisimilitude was an attribute exclusive to the logical and ordinary rather than the extraordinary or unheard-of. 61. An “event-report,” printed “on thick paper folded into small pamphlets and sold cheaply,” presented “the common perception of the event and the reactions which it generated. . . . The fact that [it was] reporting real events in no way guaranteed” its truthfulness. Refer to Ana Cristina Araujo, “European Public Opinion and the Lisbon Earthquake,” European Review 14, no. 3 (July 2006): 313–19. 62. Basically, there are two main categories of visual representations of the Lisbon earthquake: the accurate or truthful representations and the fantastical or fanciful ones. The former yield a dispassionate “report”-like illustration of the material and structural damages; see, for instance, the 1757 copper engraving of the ruins of St. Nicholas Church made by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, a French artist. The latter (fanciful) representations, usually produced anonymously outside Lisbon by artists who had not necessarily visited Portugal, aim at presenting an imaginative version of the catastrophe as experienced by the locals and fantasized by people from other countries. It goes without saying that those images were far from accurate or detailed since they aspired to goad people’s imagination and their senses rather than provide a thorough investigation of, say, how Lisbon’s infrastructure was affected. 63. Shrady, The Last Day, 166–67. 64. Letter, the Reverend William Allen to George Thicknesse who was High Master of St Paul’s, The Gentleman’s Magazine 59 (September 1789), 788–89. 65. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 44.

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66. Letter to Sir John Mordaunt, manuscript, December 15, 1755, Warwickshire County Record Office, CR1368/Vol. V item 16. 67. Charles Dickens, Household Words Journal, December 25, 1858, 89. 68. Giuseppe Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa, through England, Portugal, Spain, and France, 2 Volumes (London: 1770), i, 96–102. 69. Besides, the very ruins that continued to mar the city’s image several years after the earthquake gave off an air of “desolation” that appealed “strongly to the feelings” (Hugh Owen, Here and There in Portugal (London: 1856), 68–71. 70. Historian and Theologian Thomas Nowell raises a similar point in a 1756 sermon on the Lisbon catastrophe when he warns his British listeners that they are not running any less danger of inexplicable total destruction and they would realize that if only they could imagine “this populous and renowned city . . . apprehending no more danger than we that are here present at the moment” (quoted in Paice, 63). Nowell emphasizes that Lisboan citizens were no different from the rest of Europeans before they were hit, an idea that exposes the British public to the terrible premonition that they could be next, any time now. 71. Debbie Lisle, “Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle,” Journal of Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–21. 72. Ibid., 4. The author, however, indirectly recognizes that constructing platforms for paying respects or viewing the disastrous effects of a catastrophic event does constitute an act of aestheticizing, which might paradoxically turn the potentially real into something mediated, therefore fake. In my second chapter, I have argued that the media unknowingly (?) transformed the 9/11 event into a locus where the discrepancy between reality and representation was erased. 73. See Hamblyn, “Notes from Underground,” 113. 74. Portugal; or, the Young Travellers: Being Some Account of Lisbon and Its Environs, and of a Tour in the Alentejo . . . From a Journal Kept by a Lady During Three Years’ Actual Residence (London: 1830), 27–28, quoted also by Hamblyn. 75. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 36–37. 76. Ibid., 123. 77. Ibid., 102. 78. Ibid., 93. 79. Ibid., 93. 80. Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, “As If: Kant, Adorno, and the Politics of Poetry,” MLN 121 (2006): 767. 81. Vanessa L. Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2001): 278. 82. See Eagleton’s Holy Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47. 83. Illustrated London News, March 30, 1850, 222. 84. Paice, The Wrath of God, 242. 85. Edmund Yates, His Recollections and Experiences (1885), quoted in Paice, 243. 86. Gary Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 31. 87. Kant, Critique of Judgement, sect. 15, 59.

Conclusions

One cannot emphasize enough how image as an aesthetic or forbidden entity supports collective and individual memory, thereby underpinning ethical behavior in times of crisis. Terrifying or not, image is the language of imagination rather than concept. This means that one cannot process its “logic” in a coherent, reasonable mode pertaining to cognition; instead, to understand and appreciate image one must resort to the unruly universe of the “pre-conceptual” or the noncognitive. The pre-conceptual nature of image becomes, in turn, more evident if we shed light on its connection with individual trauma and anxiety arising from terror. This book privileges the beautiful rather than the sublime. This is not just a matter of opposing postmodern anti-aestheticism which has persistently favored the sublime; nor is it merely an attempt to shift toward a post-aesthetic (and post-postmodern) viewpoint or politics that privileges form, image and beauty as potentially reliable witnesses to the historical reality of pain, terror and violence. Going beyond those limits, this book is concerned with the subjective, but universally shared, Kantian feeling of pleasure at the sight of manmade, or not, terrorist violence. Not infrequently do we come across criticisms of terrorism announcing that the image representation of a terrorist act was allegedly “sublime” or even that a specific strike of terror had something sublime at its core. Thus, 9/11 itself was considered by many as too sublime to represent or understand, whereas the nuclear mushroom cloud arising after the detonation of the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was seen as portraying the unspeakable—which postmodernism would refer to as the “sublime” itself. In a similar tone, the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 might initially have been treated with sheer superstition—as an act of a vindictive God—but soon, under the spell of rationalism and in accordance with the newly assumed spirit of the Enlightenment, it was seen by philosophers as sublime, not in terms of its irrationality but rather in terms of the awe, respect, and terror that it evoked in the hearts and souls of men. However, my own interest lies in the disinterested aesthetic pleasure of the beautiful before a real scene of catastrophe or disaster. My focus, then, is upon aesthetic judgment and the possibility of disinterested reflection upon the image and form of terrorist disaster. It is obvious that the sublime would not be so relevant to the Kantian practice of aesthetic judgment. For Kant, aesthetic judgments are always judgments of the beautiful and as such they are always positive 145

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rather than negative. In this light, there are no aesthetic judgments of sublimity. 1 This means that the judgment of the sublime is not a judgment at all, unless sublimity were to be converted into “beautifulness”— by, for instance, being rendered into a picture to be admired at from a distance—so that one could discuss its aesthetic parameters. In the previous chapters I inquired into terrorist events—from the contemporary landscape as well as earlier chronological contexts—from the perspective of aesthetic, distanced, appreciation. Aesthetic judgment as the aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful is a key concept in this book. Aesthetic appraisal becomes particularly important when it comes to representing a terrorist catastrophe to the extent that terrorism and its images are, almost by definition, aesthetic and visually compelling. Unlike moral or determinant judgment which is based upon a priori moral concepts or interests, aesthetic or reflective judgment is grounded upon a posteriori assessments based upon spontaneous and unprejudiced thoughts or feelings reflecting one’s own personal taste and moral freedom. The forbidden aesthetics I focus on in this study is inextricably intertwined with spontaneous, a posteriori, judgment that acknowledges the— generally un-acknowledgeable—subjective feeling of the beautiful engendered by images of catastrophic terrorism. The intriguing part here, of course, is that the secret fascination at the sight of such images would be assumed by the Kantian aesthetic to be shared, if not by all, at least by a large community in the spirit of sensus communis. A legitimate question here emerges as to what kind of a subject (or subjects) is capable of feeling the beautiful as well as acknowledging its “immoral” interference in emotional processes at work during catastrophic instances of terror. For Kant, the aesthetic experiences of the beautiful and the sublime could be appreciated only by rational subjects—mostly men—who inhabit the West (rather than the East) where “fear is no longer a necessary survival response” (although in the 2016 world terror scene that is highly doubtful) and where an aesthetic enjoyment of terror takes over from an actual submission to it. Moreover, that rational man “needs to have received the right kind of education that trains him to be his own master and think and speak for himself.” 2 It is only the European mind that is supposedly capable of engaging imagination and the power of reason in such a way as to actually experience the feeling of the sublime which turns into a beautiful spectacle attested to by the “Western subject” positioned “as both spectator and actor [and] a benevolent interventionist (as colonizer, missionary . . . or volunteer).” 3 Considering all the above, is disinterested contemplation at all possible? Throughout the book, I have argued that an aesthetic appreciation of terrorism and its representations is not just possible but, on the contrary, necessary insofar as it constitutes an ethical act and a sign of personal freedom. Recent studies have demonstrated the possible link between aesthetic judgment and ethics. 4 More interestingly, critics have cast light

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upon how democratic consciousness—the epitome of an ethical existence—in a democracy needs to be constantly in an aesthetic state of dissonance with its political leaders and official authority, an idea that, in my view, also broaches the question of (anti-state) violence and terrorism as legitimate options for the citizen. 5 In spite of the attempts to connect aesthetic appreciation with ethical responsibility and freedom, there might still emerge counter-arguments endorsing the view that aesthetics is not related to ethics; that aesthetics is inherently unethical and the willful or not practice of it integral to humanity’s egoistic nature. What should we make of Arthur Schopenhauer’s rebuttal of the Kantian universality and communicability of aesthetic criteria on the basis of egoism, “this . . . original, and living norm of all acts of will that . . . has the right of first occupancy” before any principle? 6 In addition, how could we argue with Nietzsche’s angry objection to the possibility of an ethical aesthetic judgment when, for instance, he dismisses as of bad taste the idea that truth has to be “a truth for everyone else too,” and declares bluntly that “[m]y judgment is my judgment”? 7 Supposing we could ask the two great philosophers about forbidden aesthetics, that is, the morally forbidden fascination with terrorism and its aesthetic aspects, wouldn’t they undoubtedly have imputed it to people’s naturally perverse taste for the destruction of others—a morally horrifying fantasy spawned by the utterly amoral workings of the imagination? But even if aesthetics, in its forbidden sense, is unethical indeed, that is not because it transgresses the laws of ethics but, rather, because it can radically create new forms of being by the mere act of imagining them. This radical kind of imagination that creates rather than reshapes the world goes beyond pure Kantian aesthetics by constituting a free poetic (in the sense of “poesis”) agency that acts upon the world rather than in it. 8 Fascinatingly, Kant himself points in that direction for the imagination, while anticipating future theorizations of it when he refers to the potential inventiveness of the imagination that produces “peculiar fantasies with which the mind entertains itself.” 9 Now, one might wonder, what would such fantasies be about? In the mind of the terrorist, such a peculiar fantasy would be one of inexhaustible terror through an aesthetic of endless aggressiveness toward the human. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015—which have been described as the European version of “9/11”— have not just demonstrated the stepping up of the terrorist campaigns of religious fundamentalism but also the imminence of the terrorist image as a world-threatening agency moving irrationally and erratically around the globe, imagining destructive spaces inside the arenas of international politics, society, and culture.

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NOTES 1. Kant affirms that delight in the sublime in nature is only negative, whereas that in the beautiful is positive. See “Analytic of the Sublime,” Critique of Judgement, 99. 2. Christine Battersby, “Terror, Terrorism and the Sublime: rethinking the sublime after 1789 and 2001,” Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 86. 3. S. Perera, “Torturous Dialogues,” 37. See also Joseph Pugliese, “Indigeneity and the Racial Topography of Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’” in Indigeneity: Construction and re/presentation, ed. James N. Brown (Commack: Nova Science, 1999), 15–33. 4. Recently, Kennan Ferguson, among others, developed the ethico-aesthetic dimension of Kant’s reflective judgment. See, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999). 5. See for instance, F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Ankersmit argues that in the same way that we should not expect a painting to correspond exactly to the elements from the real world which it supposedly represents, we should be ready to accept the existence of an aesthetic gap between the represented (the people) and their representation (by those elected to rule them). 6. See The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. David E. Cartwright and Edward E. Erdmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 167. Schopenhauer adds: My egoism “decides for justice and loving kindness not because it wants to practise these, but because it wants to experience them.” (167). Moreover, he has famously elaborated upon Kantian disinterestedness through the lens of an aesthetic contemplation that is will-less. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), sect. 43, 40. 8. This kind of thinking approximates Cornelius Castoriadis’ insight concerning the power that radical imagination possesses: “[I]t is because radical imagination exists that ‘reality’ exists for us. . . . [Radical imagination] is radical because it creates.” From The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 321. 9. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 74.

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Index

Adorno, Theodore, xii, 142n39 aesthesis, xv, 6, 12, 20, 34, 35, 37, 69, 78, 84, 85, 89 aesthetic: appreciation, xvi, xix, 4, 6, 22, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 53, 57, 58, 67, 73, 78, 80, 85–86, 91, 102n34, 110, 116, 122, 126, 129, 137, 146, 147; distance, xiv, 2, 36, 47, 117; experience, xi, xiii, xiv, xviii, 1, 34, 35, 40, 41–42, 43, 45, 50, 52, 72, 74, 84, 86, 135, 146 aesthetics: forbidden, xi, xvii, 10, 63, 82, 89, 138, 146, 147; postmodern, xii Agamben, Giorgio, 98, 103n72 Al Qaeda, 113 amnesia, 96, 98 anaesthetic, 18 Ankersmit, F. R., 148n5 anti-aesthetic, the, xii, xix, 16 anti-aestheticism, xiii, 19, 99, 145; postmodern, xiii, 99, 145 anti-representation, xv anti-state terrorism, 17 Arendt, Hannah, 11, 12–14, 16, 18, 26n21, 26n25, 26n26, 113, 141n21 Aristotle, 8, 9 art: original, 34, 41 Artaud, Antonin, 47, 60n36 artwork, 20, 29, 31, 35, 42, 47–48, 51, 52, 67, 70, 74, 80, 81, 99, 110, 121, 123 atrocity, xiv, xvi, 3, 7, 8, 10, 20, 22, 29, 30, 37, 39, 43, 44, 51, 53, 55, 85–86, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 131 audience, xvii, 21, 23, 47–48, 51, 52, 54, 61n37, 63–64, 87, 90, 122, 130 Auschwitz, xii, 108 authentic, the, xiii, 35, 48, 50, 73, 127, 128, 131; art, 47, 72, 74; beauty, 34, 49, 69, 72, 73–74; experience, 49–50, 69

avant-garde, 30 banality, 7, 13 Baretti, Giuseppe, 130, 131 Baudrillard, Jean, 52, 55–56, 62n59, 106, 107, 139n5 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, xiii beautiful, the, xi, xii–xiv, xv, xvii, xviii–xix, xixn7, xxn9, 1–2, 3–5, 6–7, 10, 11, 14, 15–16, 17, 18–19, 20, 23, 24n4, 25n18, 27n35, 27n41, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40–41, 42, 43, 54, 58, 59n11, 65, 81, 83, 89, 90–92, 93, 96, 99, 102n34, 111, 119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 134–136, 137–138, 143n48, 143n57, 145–146, 148n1 beauty, xi, xii, xiii–xiv, xv–xvi, xvii, xviii–xix, 1, 2–3, 4–5, 10, 11–12, 14, 15, 18–19, 20, 21–23, 24n4, 27n41, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35–36, 40–41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48–50, 50–51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61n55, 62n63, 64, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 73–74, 76, 78, 79–80, 81, 82–83, 84–86, 87, 90–92, 96–97, 99–100, 102n49, 110, 120, 123, 126, 129, 131, 133–134, 136, 137, 138, 145; forbidden, 2, 20, 22, 24, 48, 76, 92, 100 Benigni, Roberto, 22, 23, 24 Benjamin, Walter, xixn8, 34, 35 Berleant, Arnold, 2, 41, 101n29 Bin Laden, Osama, 63 Bleiker, Ronald, 34 Bosch, Hieronymus, 53 Burden, Chris, 61n37 Burke, Edmund, xiii, xiv, xxn9, xxn13, xxn14, 3, 16–17, 18, 19, 24n7, 26n30, 27n36, 27n41, 42, 60n23, 107, 115, 116, 119, 120–123, 125, 126, 127, 132, 133–134, 135, 139n8, 143n56, 143n57 157

158

Index

Butler, Joseph, 107 Byrne, Edmund F., 77 calamity, 114, 121, 127 Caledonian Mercury, The, 123, 143n60 Carlson, Marvin, 51 Carroll, Noel, 20, 21 Caruth, Cathy, 96 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 148n8 catastrophe: ethical, xii, 14, 23, 76, 81; manmade, xi, xviii, 31, 97, 117; natural, 1, 6, 19, 92, 105, 108, 112, 114, 124, 139n4, 141n30; nuclear, 78, 85, 95 Caterson, Simon, 44 cognition, xiii, xiv, 12, 20–21, 26n27, 70, 72, 73, 84, 95, 115, 145 complicity, 17–18, 90, 99 consensus, 4, 54, 55, 83 contagion effect, 44, 60n29 Corbin, Alain, 119 Crete, 79 Critique of Judgement, xiii, xvii, xixn8, 13, 15, 32, 49, 69, 100n7, 113, 141n21 culture, 21, 50, 55, 71, 83, 117, 125, 132, 147; Western, 10 Cyclorama of Lisbon, 136 Dal Pozzo, Cassiano, 79 defamiliarization, 49–50, 61n40 deformity, 80 dehumanization, 23, 94, 99 Delacroix, Eugene, 42–43, 81, 101n29 delight, xxn13, 1, 3, 4, 14, 24n7, 27n36, 32, 82, 91, 116, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126–127, 129, 133–134, 136, 138, 143n56, 143n57, 148n1 delightful horror, 133–134 democratic instinct, 13 Derrida, Jacques, xii, xviii, xixn8, 15, 16, 59n17, 64, 98 Dickens, Charles, 128, 129 disaster : manmade, 105; natural, 105, 106, 123, 130, 139n2; nuclear, xvi, 76–78, 85–86, 89, 114; tourists, 125, 128, 130, 134, 135 disinterestedness, 1–2, 24n4, 31, 32, 41, 92, 122, 138, 148n6 Dobson, John, 128

Dollimore, Jonathan, 50, 51 Eagleton, Terry, 135 Eaton, A. W., 78, 79–80 Eichmann, Adolf, 13, 26n25, 26n26 empathy, xv, 9, 14, 18, 113, 119, 127, 142n41 Enlightenment, the, xi, xiv, 9, 97, 107, 112, 117, 119, 127, 132, 145 ethicism, 80 ethics, xiv, xvii, xix, 1, 6, 10, 15, 18, 30, 37, 39, 40, 78, 85, 91, 100, 102n53, 104n78, 118, 146–147 ethos, 9, 21 Ettinger, Bracha, 94 event-reports, 124 evil, xi, xii, xxn14, 7, 11, 13–14, 23, 24, 32, 46, 51, 60n33, 64, 80, 91, 93, 106, 107, 109, 110, 120, 126, 129, 140n16 experience: original, 34, 42, 49, 95 extraordinary ruins, 126, 131–132 fantasy, 17, 37, 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 68, 79, 94, 114, 123, 132, 147 fascination, xi, xiv, xvi, xviii, 3, 18, 19, 33, 34, 39, 56, 57, 58, 62n60, 75, 81, 89, 107, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 129, 131, 134, 138, 146, 147 Ferguson, Kennan, 148n4 Fielding, Henry, 130, 142n35 Figueiredo, Antonio Pereira de, 111, 112, 140n19, 141n20 free play, 15, 26n27, 42, 49, 69, 84 freedom, xxn14, 2, 4, 6, 8–9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18–19, 22, 31, 32, 41, 64, 92, 99, 100, 111, 120, 125, 135, 146–147 French Revolution, the, 107, 135, 139n8 Freud, Sigmund, 23–24 Geers, Kendell, 21, 47 Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 117–118 Groves, Leslie (General), 83 Gracyk, Theodore, 25n18 Ground Zero, xvi, 37, 40, 41, 77, 90, 132 Guernica, 60n24 Hegel, 47 Heidegger, Martin, xixn8, 43, 68, 94 heterogeneity, 33, 54, 128

Index hibakusha, 93, 95, 96–97, 98, 103n73, 139n2 Hiroshima, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 5, 20, 21, 63, 64, 65, 75, 78, 82, 83, 85–89, 90, 91, 93–94, 95, 96, 97–98, 99, 105 Hirsh, Marianne, 103n72 Hirst, Damien, 29–30, 31–32, 35, 41, 44–45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 72 Holocaust, xii, xv, xvi, 22, 24, 63, 77, 93, 98, 103n71, 104n77 horror, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii, 3, 6–7, 11, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 37–39, 39, 42, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 75, 76–77, 78, 81, 85, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98–99, 107, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133–134, 136, 137, 138 Hume, David, 24n4, 80 Ibuse, Masuji, 97 iconoclasm, 16 images: disaster, 137; fantastic, 124; forbidden, xv, 24, 58, 68; of catastrophe, xi, 3, 89, 131; of extreme violence, 6, 95; of destruction, 11, 76, 85, 95, 129; of horror, 6, 20, 77, 88, 95, 98, 118, 138; of terror, xi, 3, 5, 7, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20, 24; of terrorism, 11, 20, 146 imagination, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18–19, 20, 22, 26n27, 33, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43–44, 44–45, 47, 49–50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 81, 84, 85, 86–87, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102n34, 106, 107, 108, 112, 113–115, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 130, 132, 133, 135, 141n21, 143n62, 145, 146, 147, 148n8; radical, 47, 148n8; nonconceptual, 35 immorality, xi, xiv, 10, 15, 31, 41, 45, 58, 73, 81–82, 119, 121, 141n30, 143n56 impartiality, 1, 2 inhumanity, 7, 41, 42, 46, 50, 90, 94, 132 Inquisition, the, 132, 133–134, 139n12, 141n20, 141n30 inventiveness, 8, 147 irrationality, 12, 106, 137, 145

159

Japan, 64, 84, 85, 97, 98, 101n9, 103n74, 139n1 Johnson, Samuel, xxn14, 123, 130, 140n16, 143n60 jouissance, 56 judgment: aesthetic, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 25n8, 26n27, 35, 40, 53, 54, 70, 78, 91–92, 122, 127, 135, 137, 145–147; determinant, 4, 11, 14, 31, 32, 42, 56, 70, 73, 92, 127, 146; reflective, xvii, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 25n8, 30, 31, 33, 35, 41, 45, 56, 58, 70, 71, 91–92, 127, 137, 146, 148n4 justice: ethical, xvi, 3, 6, 8, 13, 23, 92 Kant, Immanuel, xiii–xiv, xv, xvii, xixn8, xxn16, 1–3, 4–5, 6, 7–8, 9–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 18, 19, 24n4, 24n7, 25n8, 25n14, 25n18, 25n19, 26n21, 27n35, 30–31, 32, 33, 34–35, 40, 42, 49, 49–50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59n11, 64, 69, 70, 73, 83–84, 92, 93, 100, 100n7, 110–111, 113–114, 119, 122, 123, 127, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139n8, 140n17, 141n21, 143n48, 143n57, 145, 146, 147, 148n1, 148n4 Kauffmann, Krista, 25n17 Kearney Richard, 17 Kouno, Fumiyo, 98 Kyoto, 83, 84, 85 law: ethical, xvii; human, xvii, 3, 6, 13, 14, 19, 39; moral, xvii, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 56, 92, 126; unwritten, 13, 23, 74, 126 Laurence, William, 92 Leibniz, Gottfried, 109 Lentricchia, Frank, 34, 50, 51 Lisbon earthquake, xi, xiv, xviii, xxn14, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 117, 120, 126, 131, 132, 134, 141n30, 143n62, 145 Lisle, Debbie, 131 logos, 9 lynching, 36 Lyotard, Jean Francois, xii, xixn8, 16, 59n11, 98, 103n71, 103n72 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 52

160

Index

Maclear, Kyo, xvi, 90, 94 Malagrida, Gabriel, 141n30 Mandoki, Katya, 54 manga, 98 Manhattan Project, 11, 68 Margolis, Joseph, 8, 9, 25n14 Masco, Joseph, 67 Massacre at Chios (Delacroix painting), 42–43, 81 materiality, xiv, 48, 91, 118 Matsubara, Miyoko, 87 McEwan, Ian, 113 memory, xv, xvii, 6, 10, 16, 19, 20–21, 25n12, 25n17, 36–37, 39, 58, 60n24, 65, 71, 78, 87, 93, 95–96, 98, 103n71, 103n72, 111, 112, 115, 145 metaphor, 50, 67, 115, 116, 124 metaphysics, xiii, 98 Methuen Treaty, 116 Meyerowitz, Joel, 37–39, 39–40, 41 Miller, Hillis, xvii, xxn21, 3, 8, 13, 102n53 Milton, John, 60n33 Mitchell, W. J. T., 19 modernity, 117, 142n39 morality, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 18, 19, 22, 31–32, 33, 35, 39, 41, 45, 46, 65, 70, 73, 79–80, 91, 92, 100, 102n53, 119, 129, 138 Murray, John, 140n13 mushroom cloud, xv, 5, 20, 21, 64, 65, 70–71, 73, 74, 78, 82, 89, 93, 94, 99, 102n57, 145 Nagai, Takashi, 96–97 Nagasaki, xi, xiv, xvi, xviii, 5, 20, 63, 64, 65, 75, 82, 83, 87–89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97–98, 105, 107, 145 narrative, xvi, 18, 25n12, 34, 40, 48, 53, 69, 75–76, 78, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102n57, 103n73, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 129, 131, 137, 142n31, 142n33 Neiman, Susan, 139n11 New York, xiii, xv, xvii, xixn4, xixn6, xxn10, xxn18, 24, 41, 47, 53, 62n63, 68, 75–76, 77, 92, 106, 131–132 newness, 49–50, 69, 103n71, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25n11, 147 noncognitive faculties, 20

novelty, xv, 12, 121, 122, 127, 134 Oliveira, Francisco Xavier de, 140n13 Oppenheimer, Robert, 66 optimism, 107, 109, 110, 111, 140n16 originality, 34–35, 41 otaku, 98 otherness, xv, xxn16, 40, 45, 59n11, 107 outbidding, 60n28 Paice, Edward, 141n30, 144n70 pathos, 9 Pedegache, Miguel Tiberio, 124 Pepys, Samuel, 142n35 Perera, Suvendrini, 142n37, 148n3 performance, xi, 23, 47, 51, 53, 61n37, 63, 68, 72, 80, 117, 122, 123, 137 Picasso, 60n24 pleasure, xiv, xv, 3, 4, 5, 10–11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 27n35, 30, 33, 35–36, 40, 42, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 67, 68, 76, 84, 93, 100, 102n52, 119, 120–121, 123, 127, 129, 133–134, 135, 137, 145–146 polis, 10, 16 politics, 7, 10, 15, 26n21, 30, 34, 37, 40, 47, 80, 92, 101n9, 103n71, 145, 147 Pope, Alexander, 107, 109, 110 post-aesthetic, 97; attitude, 20, 100; beauty, xviii, 100; politics, 145 post-metaphysical paradigm, xvii postmodernism, xix, xxn16, 59n11, 145 poststructuralism, 97 prejudice, xi, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, 24n4, 32, 33, 41, 58, 70, 73, 92, 93, 100, 122, 129, 138 presentation: negative, 77, 98 purity, 41, 46 radicality, 27n41, 40 realism, 30, 99, 128 representation, xi, xiv–xv, xviii, xxn14, 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 16, 24, 25n8, 29, 31–32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 57–58, 65, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80–82, 86, 89, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99–100, 101n9, 102n34, 102n52, 103n72, 103n73, 103n74, 104n76, 116, 117–118, 120, 124–125,

Index 135, 137, 138, 143n62, 144n72, 145, 146, 148n5 repulsion, xi, xviii, 120 Root-Bernstein, Robert S., 84 Rosenthal, Peggy, 71 safety, 3, 44, 57, 91, 100n7, 105, 106, 117, 119, 129, 132, 137 Schiller, Friedrich von, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 147, 148n6 science fiction, 87, 98 security, 30, 44, 51, 57, 87, 105, 106 seeing, xvi, 11, 51, 56, 61n40, 82, 86, 126, 141n20, 142n41 sensibility, 1, 2, 5, 6, 12, 19, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 67, 84, 93, 94, 142n41 sensus communis, 4–6, 18, 25n11, 114, 146 September 11, 2001, xi, xii, xviii, 3, 11, 24, 29, 37, 43, 44, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59n17, 62n63, 64, 113 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 2 Sliwinski, Sharon, 118, 142n41 Shklovsky, Victor, 61n40 Shrady, Nicholas, 116, 142n33 Siebers, Tobin, 40 singularity, xiii, 7, 19, 124, 130, 137 solidarity, 14, 56, 65, 120 Sontag, Susan, 95–96 spectacularity, xv, 12, 34, 36, 64, 70, 122, 137 spectator, xix, 3, 6, 7, 11, 21, 34, 36, 42, 47, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60n36, 72, 76, 83, 87, 90, 99, 116, 117–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129–130, 131, 132, 136, 137–138, 146 Stern, Jessica, 63, 75, 76 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 30, 44–46, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52–53, 55, 57, 72, 74 Stukeley, William, 140n19, 141n30 sublime, xii, xv, xvii, xxn16, 16–18, 25n18, 27n35, 27n41, 59n11, 66, 96, 97, 100n7, 103n71, 107, 111, 117–119, 120, 122, 125, 133–136, 137, 139n8, 145–146 symbiosis, 30 synaesthesia, 84 synaesthetic, 10, 84, 85, 130 synosia, 84

161

Takahashi, Yasufumi, 99 taste, xixn8, 1–2, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 24n4, 25n11, 25n19, 31, 32, 49, 55, 65, 69, 83, 93, 114, 129, 146, 147; individual, xiii, 32, 34, 60n24, 138 terror, xi, xii, xv, xvi–xvii, xviii, xix, 1, 3, 4, 6–7, 8, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25n12, 27n36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 59n17, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 75, 76, 79, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 94, 99–100, 105, 106, 107, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133–134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143n56, 145, 146, 147; terrorism, ix, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, 1, 2, 3–5, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39, 43, 44, 44–45, 47, 51–52, 54, 58, 60n36, 63–64, 65, 75, 76, 82, 84, 86, 95, 96, 100, 101n13, 105–106, 125, 129, 138, 145–147; terrorist, xixn1, 11, 43–44, 44, 45, 47–48, 51–52, 52, 54, 56, 60n28, 64, 75, 78, 82, 113, 147 totalitarianism, 17 trauma, xvi, 19, 20, 37, 75, 94, 96, 99, 142n37, 145 Treaty of Windsor, 116 tsunami, xi, xii, xviii, 105, 108, 109, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121, 124, 128, 131, 137 Twin Towers, xvii, 29, 48, 49–50, 51, 58, 62n63, 75 ugliness, xii, xiv, 20, 22–23, 39, 41, 42, 46, 53, 80, 87, 99, 137 uniqueness, 7, 15, 82, 95 universality, 4, 32, 147; subjective, 12 utopia, 51 violence: extreme, xiv, xix, 1, 3, 6, 96 Virilio, Paul, xi, xixn1 Voltaire, 107, 110, 127, 140n16 War on Terror, xvii Weart, Spencer, 85 Western subject, 119, 146 Wolfall, Richard, 112, 113, 114 World Trade Center, xv, 5, 29, 32, 38, 42, 44, 50, 51, 57, 107

162 Yamasaki, Kanji, 88 Yuka, Nishioka, 98

Index Žižek, Slavoj, 62n65