Pre-class Baudrillard and Zizek- Racquel

 I really enjoyed Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism and Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real readings. Unlike with the Lyotard and Habermas readings, I really feel like I was able to understand the key concepts of their texts. Like in Baudrillard’s text, Zizek refers to September 11 in his concept of reality vs. virtual reality. He states “we can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentieth century art’s ‘passion for the Real’ – the ‘terrorists’ themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it” (231). I like this quote because I agree that the WTC was not just about the wreckage that it caused but also about the overall effect of the act itself. The shock behind it, the inconceivability of it, the devastation it caused, all of this together helped make this event unforgettable for us. Even so, we wanted to see it again and again, and we were shown by the media the images of it over and over.  Braudrillard states in his text that “there is no good use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions” (229). And yet, even days after, some of us still couldn’t believe it was real.  Returning to Zizek, he connects us to Barthes saying that the repeated images of it “was jouissance at its purest” (232).  After, he states “And the same ‘derealization’ of the horror went on after the WTC collapse: while  the number of victims – 3,000 – is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see – no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people…..” He then compares this to our commercials of Third World countries and poverty which show these kinds of disturbing images.  He ends this part asking “Is this not yet further proof of how, even in this tragic moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here?” Here he uses “distance” again, similar to Macherey’s “rupture” and Barthes “gap”. He is stating that it’s this “distance” that we should be focusing on when we talk about reality.