For Bousquiet, September 11 was a moment in which everything changed; an ‘omnipresent point of reference … marking [both the] culmination of History leading to it [and] the start of a period in which past assumptions [could] not hold’ (link, p. 757). But this may be an inadequately nuanced interpretation of events.
Basu, for example, argues that the nature of the sublime moment prevents its mapping in the ‘available matrices of temporality, semiology or historicism – not even as a break in the normative flow of meaning … The event does not lodge itself inside a gap in the continuum of history, but blasts it open altogether.’ (link, p. 13)
In this reading, Smith’s description of New York on September 11 as a ‘strangely-out-of-time and out-of-space experience’ (link) appears to have a weight and veracity above and beyond the implied subjectivity of its author, who goes on to describe how …
