HOLLA! Slavoj Zizek

The September 11th attacks are embedded in every Americans mind from the images we saw on newspaper covers to the copious media coverage we watched on every American News station. It was almost like you were watching a movie because you never thought something like this could really happen, could be ‘real’. Slavoj Zizek’s reading reminisces about September 11th media coverage by saying, “When, days after September 11 2001, our gaze was transfixed by images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers, we were all forced to experiences what the ‘compulsion to repeat’ and jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again; the same shots were repeated ad nausea, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purist” (231-232). As we all watched this tragic event it really was like watching a movie developed by Hollywood. We weren’t really at the scene it wasn’t our reality. Zizek says, “even in this tragic moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here” (232). I feel as if we as American’s felt on top of the world and protected before that tragic day when the WTC towers fell. We lived in a reality where fear was not an issue, where what we saw on television was fiction, not reality. Now that terror has knocked on our front doors, it is only now that we see our reality as ‘real’. Before we saw terror and horror as only something in the movies or in blood diamond thirsty Africa, not at our front door. But 9/11 has changed that and our reality is now real. “It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality” (234). In other words, as we lived in our powerful/feared/perfect bubble (America before 9/11/), reality (terror, horror, death) entered our world and shattered what we saw as reality, as America.