ABSTRACT
This chapter describes 9/11 as a traumatic event: an impossible situation beyond the possibilities of intelligibility, beyond verbal communication and sense, where language failed. It highlights how representations of 9/11 took on mute and hyper-realistic qualities as a result of a failure of language and discusses a traumatic event as an aporetic situation and investigate the consequences of such an analogy. The chapter demonstrates how being in aporia—and going through the collapse of dominant representations—allows for the circulation of emotions from the individual to the collective level. It explores the relationship between aporia and social change. The relationship between trauma and existential angst is nothing new. Sigmund Freud devoted himself exhaustively to the topic in a bid to understand the causes and symptoms that accompanied the state of anxiety. Traumatic events, such as wars or terrorist attacks, produce rupture and break continuity. The emotional mess she described fits with A. A. G. Ross’s circulation of transformative affect and raw experience.
