ABSTRACT
Art Spiegelman’s comix are unique in the memory culture after the attacks in that they are a riotously irreverent testimony to a deeply felt unsettlement. The oversized panels target directly the nexus between trauma as an experience, and as a discourse, attempting to unravel this seemingly inextricable knot. Thus taking a rm stand against the call for an end of the postmodern “age of irony” in the face of large-scale violence (Rosenblatt 2001), Spiegelman develops an ethics of disturbance which externalizes shock and works via a logic of metamorphosis and change. This is a turn not from pain to redemption, but from paralysis to the self-ironic, yet existential despair of satirical criticism. In the Shadows of No Towers is therefore a singular response, diametrically opposed to both the discourse of an incommensurate, national trauma that was increasingly politicized, and the gestures of stunned shock that prevailed, for instance, in the photographic record of the attacks. Indeed, it was deemed so provocative that it was rst serialized in the German paper Die Zeit before being published in the U.S. in 2004.
