Embodying terror: reading terrorism with Luce Irigaray

In the wake of the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001, two seemingly disparate ideas gained popular and academic currency. On the one hand, the growing cultural anxiety about the power of the image finally seemed to have been justified, as the unprecedented scale of the attacks, combined with their unprecedented coverage, left a global audience with the impression that the purpose of the attacks was precisely the production of such spectacular images. Jean Baudrillard was not alone when he argued in The Spirit of Terrorism that the collapse of the World Trade Center did not herald ‘a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in an allegedly virtual universe’, but instead demonstrated that ‘the spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us’ (pp. 28, 30). For Baudrillard, Žižek and others, ‘it is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality’ (Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 16). According to these thinkers and many others, the horrific images produced on that day ushered in the totalitarianism of the image, and the death of reality: ‘for reality is a principle, and it is this principle that is lost’ as the image becomes that which shapes reality, rather than records or represents reality (Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 28).