Bleeding Edge: "The Trade Center towers were religious too" (p. 338)

[Paul Mackin]

I always thought 11 Wall street (NYSE) was the symbolic and religious
center of American (Western) capitalism,  with its opening and closing
(church) bells ringing away.

P

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Shawn, as a fake Zen therapist, might not be the novel's most trustworthy
> voice, but here he is on to something. Discussions about the symbolic
> dimension of the Twin Towers tend, also on this list, to reduce it to its
> phallic element. This is there, no doubt, but if this was all there is, it
> could have been just any skyscraper. Yet the Trade Center Towers were not
> just any skyscraper. Artists like Philippe Petit or Wim Wenders ("Der
> Amerikanische Freund", 1977) realized this right away. The Twin Towers were
> the symbolic center of Western capitalism. And when they were destroyed,
> Western people in general and US people in particular perceived this as an
> attack on "our way of life", as chancellor Schröder put it back then.
> Shawn's comparison of the WTC attacks to the blowing up of the Buddha
> statues in Afghanistan makes this symbolic dimension clear.
> The shock and the confusion afterwards (including the belittling of the
> terrorists' courage) have to do with the recognition that on the symbolic
> level the battle was once and for all already decided. The biggest single
> anti-modernity statement ever! So what the fuck can you do? Nothing. You can
> lead war in the Middle East as long as you want: This will not make it
> undone. The only adequate symbolic answer, Sloterdijk hinted at that
> immediately, would have been to blow up the Kaaba in Mecca. But that -
> thanks to the crumbs of rationality being left on the table - was never an
> option. Not even for the most insane military person.  Another religious
> symbolic dimension of the event lies in the fact that a person socialized
> into one of the three monotheistic religions could hardly avoid thinking of
> the Tower of Babel, a problematic association when one considers the origin
> of this story.
>
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