Clouds: On a Possible Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics

Abstract

Throughout history, clouds have both defined and dislocated the borders separating earth from sky, this world from the next. But in so doing, they have also cast their shadows—for they are almost always singularly plural, to use Jean-Luc Nancy's formulation—upon the earth and obscured the heavens that they appear to protect and to dissimulate. In the twentieth century, as the immanentizing of the transcendent approaches a cataclysmic culmination, this ambivalent signification of clouds reaches new heights—and depths. This essay retraces two such emergences: the clouds through which Hitler's plane flies at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and the clouds of rubble that cover the streets of lower Manhattan upon the collapse of the Twin Towers in visual images that continue to circulate in the media. In a larger study under way, a subsequent text will discuss an obvious missing link between these two groups of clouds: the mushroom clouds rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Keywords:

• 9/11
• Sigmund Freud
• Adolf Hitler
• Thomas Hoepker
• isolation
• Immanuel Kant
• National Socialism
• Leni Riefenstahl
• Carl Schmitt
• screen memory
• terror

Notes

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 97.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that this phrase was also the name of the restaurant on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center offered its patrons a panoramic view of the world below—and this is perhaps also what, in view of its link to global finance capital, made it a target for those who were to destroy it.

Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, ed. James Strachey, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 147.

See “Das Unbewußte,” in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. X (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1963), 273ff.

Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety 47.

Ibid., 48–49.

I leave “superego” unmodified simply because I cannot find a term in English that would improve on it, whereas “I” and “it” are perfectly usable words that convey the colloquial quality associated with the German Ich and Es—something that “Ego” and “Id” do not.

Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety 47–48.

“Das Formale in der Vorstellung eines Dinges, d.i. die Zusammenstimmung des Mannigfaltigen zu Einem,” Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe), vol. 5: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902–), 227.

When one encounters the notion of “embodiment” today, it almost always takes for granted that the body that em-bodies (incarnates) is a human body, and this suggests that the tradition of a certain theological (Christian) humanism continues to exercise its influence in the midst of thinkers who consider themselves resolutely secular.

The fact that martyrdom has become, in recent years, a powerful force in Islamist-Jihadist struggles suggests that the conception that links martyrdom to the resurrection of the body is by no means limited to Christianity.

Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

Interested readers may wish to consult seminal works such as Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 291–312; and Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). This essay will not address the vast body of scholarship on Riefenstahl's films or visual culture in Nazi Germany more generally.

Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren 1902–1945 (Frankfurt am Main/Berlin: Ullstein, 1990), 224.

In a series of notes written between 1936 and 1946, published under the title “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Heidegger makes the connection between the metaphysical forgetting of ontological difference and a certain (Christian) humanism: “So comes to dominance the only decisive question: what form or figure (Gestalt) is proper to man. Here ‘Gestalt’ is construed in an indeterminate (but) metaphysical, i.e., Platonic, manner, namely as that which is and which determines all tradition and development, while itself remaining independent of it.” Martin Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” Vorträge und Aufsätze, vol. 1 (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1954), 79.

“Das Formale in der Vorstellung eines Dinges, d.i. die Zusammenstimmung des Mannigfaltigen zu Einem (unbestimmt was es sein solle)” (Kant, 227). To be sure, Kant refuses to allow the “One” or unity of the aesthetic judgment to be determined by any sort of generalizable concept. It must remain singular and therefore, in his eyes, subjective. It is this insistence on the irreducibility of the singular that the fascist emphasis on unification cannot accept. But it is also this insistence on the singular encounter that much modern “aesthetics” cannot accept either, since such insistence problematizes the claim to universality that is inseparable from the modern notion of “art.” What is characteristic of Riefenstahl's images and shots is the way they seek to maximize the variety of aspects of individuals and groups, which make up the militarized mass, in order to avoid that the latter appear as totally mechanical.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 4: 269.

This can be contrasted with the essentially individualistic-agonistic mass of runners gathered to compete in organized marathons—figures more appropriate to contemporary neoliberal capitalist society.

Another interesting contrast to this moving mass can be found in the 1932 film Kühle Wampe by Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow, which depicts groups of workers on their way to a sport festival, but without the militarized mobilization characteristic of the Nazi rallies and highlighted in Riefenstahl's “documentary.” The musical score by Hanns Eisler could hardly be further removed from the pseudo-Wagnerian score of Triumph of the Will. The musical style of the latter is clearly far closer to popular tastes today than is that of Eisler.

Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 4: 282, translation modified.

In an article for Slate, Hoepker explained why he chose not to publish the photo. Thomas Hoepker, “I Took That 9/11 Photo,” September 14, 2006, accessed February 7, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/09/i_took_that_911_photo.html.

Frank Rich, “Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?,” New York Times, September 10, 2006, accessed February 7, 2013, http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10rich.html?_r=1.

Paul Krugman, “The Years of Shame,” New York Times, September 11, 2011, accessed February 7, 2013, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/the-years-of-shame/?scp=2&sq=krugman& st=cse.

Michael Mets, “To the Editor,” New York Times, September 12, 2011, accessed February 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/a-furor-over-paul-krugmans-911-blog-post.html.