This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by McKim, J. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Agamben at Ground Zero

A Memorial without Content

Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University (Montreal, Canada)

Construction has recently begun on Michael Arad and Peter Walker's `Reflecting Absence' 9/11 memorial in New York. The design, with its emphasis on traumatic absences and silent contemplation, has moved from selection to construction with relatively little public debate, an indication of a problematic creative and critical consensus forming around contemporary memorial aesthetics. The article seeks to re-open this critical discussion by turning to the philosophy of aesthetics, poetics and language developed by Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds us of the classical Greek association of art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather than praxis, the active expression of the artist's creative will. Taking this distinction as his starting point, Agamben develops a theory of aesthetics that is neither a modernist embrace of nihilism nor a conservative call for a return to the classical pursuit of universal truths. Agamben posits instead an art concerned not with the transmission of any particular content, but with the task of transmission itself. For Agamben it is the potentiality of the event of language, a kind of pure communicability, that is the ground for our common belonging in the world. Agamben's theories of poetics and language may help us imagine a Ground Zero memorial that moves beyond a strictly didactic or therapeutic role and seeks instead to bring into being a radical space of communication.

Key Words: 9/11 • aesthetics • Agamben • architecture • memorialization • poiesis

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?