Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (review)

The cover art for Phillip Wegner's second monograph shows an aerial photograph of that most eerily present of absences: the space formerly occupied by the two towers that constituted the World Trade Center. The image may serve as a deterrent to some readers: Do we really need another delineation of the cultural significance of that absence and the events (or nonevents, as Wegner will suggest) that caused it to be so? But Wegner's lively and wide-ranging study is less about 9/11 as a moment in itself, or even as a moment that inaugurated a new historical era, than as a moment of closure. Drawing upon Alain Badiou's notion of "the Event"—a phenomenon that, in its break with the status quo, embodies "the very possibility of a radical new beginning" (23)—the author suggests that the terrorist attack on New York and the Pentagon was not, as many commentators have suggested, a hitherto unimaginable, entirely Other rupture in the fabric of history. Rather, the attacks were a "repetition" of a truly incommensurate and radically Other occurrence, a bona fide Event—the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was not until the "second death" that took place on September 11, 2001, that the Event in Berlin almost twelve years earlier was "completed"; it was only this second collapse that allowed the true meaning and significance of the first to be revealed. Thus the "Long Nineties" that intervened between the first and second deaths, the Event and its repetition, were in some sense ahistorical, a temporal parenthesis in which "new kinds of political and cultural experimentation" became possible. Understanding 9/11 in this way allows us to recognize those eleven years and ten months as "a coherent cultural period," and a rather singular one at that. Wegner goes on to argue that the apocalyptic mood pervading many of the cultural texts produced in this period is not merely attributable to fin-de-siècle anxiety but operated in the service of prefiguring the narrative closure that the fall of the Berlin Wall required in order to make sense, a closure that was ultimately to come when those planes made contact with the towers of the World Trade Center. Much of the cultural production of the Long Nineties, then, offered up premonitions, or "figurations," of the second death that was to be the necessary supplement to the first.

Clearly there are some important ethical ramifications at issue in such an analysis. Perhaps recalling the charges of amorality leveled at Jean Baudrillard when he posited, in typically provocative mode, that "the Gulf War did not take place," Wegner is keen to stress that 9/11's ontological status as a repetition, rather than an Event on its own terms, by no means diminishes or denies its significance: "Indeed, it is to make the opposite claim" (25). Furthermore, Wegner is also compelled to disavow the potential implication that in its role as a repetition and thus a closure of the "first death" that took place in November 1989, 9/11 was somehow necessary, inevitable, even predestined. This anxiety over an inadvertent appeal to apocalyptic fatalism may explain Wegner's emphasis on human agency, particularly toward the end of the book: thus the 1990s are configured as "an opportunity for imagining new forms of collectivity," forms that we are invited to "rekindle" as we move forward into a new global era (14, 42).

The study is highly successful in its synthesis of critical theory and close analysis of popular texts, the majority of which are noncanonical (Don DeLillo's Underworld and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx are exceptions in an eclectic inventory that also includes the Terminator film franchise, the television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the utopian science fictions of Octavia Butler and Joe Haldeman). The author is notably effective at summarizing and...