ABSTRACT
Less than 48 hours after a void appeared in the New York skyline, two different sources in completely different parts of the world sent out an electronic message to various discussion lists, containing a document in which Slavoj Žižek cast his critical eye on the impact of the terrorist attacks within our late capitalist consumer society. Implicitly relying on Lacan's notion of the fantasy as a psychic protection against the traumatic intrusion of the real, Žižek argued, amongst other things, that the events of 11 September 2001 managed to create such a devastating shockwave precisely because America was suddenly faced with a scene it had already visualized numerous times in its Hollywood disaster movies. Less than a week after Žižek's statement had been forwarded, another message was sent out, again from various sources, in which the collapse of the WTC was also dissected with the conceptual tools of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second message was a composite text comprising an article by Eric Laurent, president of the École de la Cause Freudienne, an abridged translation of a paper by Abel Fainstein, president of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association (associated with the IPA), and the transcription of an interview with Jacques-Alain Miller, president of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, on the validity of the viewpoints expressed in the two previous texts. Laurent claimed that the Twin Towers had been attacked neither as symbols (of prosperity and pride, but also of banality) nor as functional entities (office blocks for the financial world), but as objects of a jouissance extracted from market globalization by the Wall Street moguls. Fainstein, for his part, conceded that the terrorist onslaught defies understanding and that the destruction of symbolic points of reference, like the WTC and the Pentagon, was bound to shatter people's psychic coordinates, leaving them perplexed and traumatized. In his comments, Miller first endeavoured to reconcile the two ostensibly contradictory interpretations with reference to the two sides of Lacanian theory—that of the signifier and that of the object—and then decided to postpone his own opinion, on the grounds of mental slowness and a general lack of information.
