9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Book Details
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press
- Published : January 2006
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 192
- Category :
Culture and Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 24082
- ISBN 13 : 9780226759395
- ISBN 10 : 0226759393
Also by David Simpson
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After the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, a general sense that the world was different - that nothing would ever be the same - settled upon a grieving nation; the events of that day were received as cataclysmic disruptions of an ordered world. Refuting this claim, David Simpson examines the complex and paradoxical character of American public discourse since that September morning, considering the ways the event has been aestheticized, exploited, and appropriated, while Ground Zero remains the contested site of an effort at adequate commemoration.
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In '9/11: The Culture of Commemoration', Simpson argues that elements of the conventional culture of mourning and remembrance- grieving the dead, summarizing their lives in obituaries, and erecting monuments in their memory - have been co-opted for political advantage. He also confronts those who labeled the event an "apocalypse," condemning their exploitation of 9/11 for the defense of torture and war.
In four elegant chapters - two of which expand on essays originally published in the London Review of Books to great acclaim - Simpson analyzes the response to 9/11: the nationally syndicated "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times; the debates over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center towers and the memorial design; the representation of American and Iraqi dead after the invasion of March 2003, along with the worldwide circulation of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs; and the urgent and largely ignored critique of homeland rhetoric from the domain of critical theory.
Calling for a sustained cultural and theoretical analysis, '9/11: The Culture of Commemoration' is the first book of its kind to consider the events of that tragic day with a perspective so firmly grounded in the humanities and so persuasive about the contribution they can make to our understanding of its consequences.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Taking Time
1. Remembering the Dead: An Essay upon Epitaphs
2. The Tower and the Memorial: Building, Meaning, Telling
3. Framing the Dead
4. Theory in the Time of Death
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
David Simpson is joint Head of the Tavistock Clinic Learning Disabilities Service. Following a background in paediatrics, he trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. He is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Programme Director for Specialist Training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Tavistock Clnic, and is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Royal Free and University College London Hospital Medical School. He is a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and works in private practice as a psychoanalyst.
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