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Phenomenology

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Falling Man
The Time of Trauma, the Time of (Certain) Images

Mauro Carbone
Institut Universitaire de France/Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
mauro.carbone@univ-lyon3.fr

Abstract

Undoubtedly, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 has been an unprecedented visual
event. And yet, as was pointed out by an article published in Esquire in 2003, “in the
most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of
people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo.” This taboo
looks like the other side of what Allen Feldman calls a “temporal therapy”: “the au-
dience was being given temporal therapy by witnessing a mechanical sequence of
events, over and over, which restored the linearity of time, which had been suspend-
ed with the assaults.” Still, images like the photograph that is well-known under the
title of “Falling Man” could be, thanks to their peculiar temporality, a good antidote
against this “temporal therapy,” which aims at the formation of a specific “collective
memory, and therefore of collective forgetfulness.” On top of a study on this kind
of pictures, this paper will take into account the late Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a mutual
precession of reality and images as a useful tool for understanding the peculiar tem-
porality of such pictures.

Keywords

9/11 – jumpers – tragic images – iconoclasm – precession – linearity

…
The questions that need to be asked of images in our time […] are not
just what they mean and what they do. We must also ask how they live
and move, how they evolve and mutate, and what sorts of needs, desires,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341365

falling man 191

and demands they embody, generating a field of affect and emotion that
animates the structures of feeling that characterize our age.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 2011, XIX

∵
1 If it were not for its Images

By now we know this well: 9/11 was the beginning of something. Something
whose political and medial components, as well as a third element linked to
the psychoanalytic field, are melted in a whole that I would first of all qualify
as aesthetic, according to the meaning assumed by this term in a philosophical
tradition that does not cease to recall its etymon.
Three months later Jürgen Habermas stated as follows: “Perhaps September 11
could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact,
the explosion, the slow collapse—everything that was not Hollywood any-
more but, rather, a gruesome reality, literally took place in front of the ‘univer-
sal eyewitness’ of a global public.”1 “As if we were somehow all standing right
there and just saw the same traffic accident,”2 David Foster Wallace anno-
tated with painful understatement: in other terms, as if we all saw the same

1  Jürgen Habermas, “Fundamentalism and Terror. A Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas,” in

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 28. As Borradori timely re-
marks, “the notion of historic world event, which Habermas uses to specify the uniqueness
of 9/11, refers to the simultaneity of reality and representation at the global or world level”
(ibid., 180, n3). If the components of such a simultaneity are not considered in their insepara-
bility, one may not catch the uniqueness of the event of 9/11. Although it is true, for instance,
that Susan Sontag, in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, seems to highlight accurately
the epoch-marking role of other historical events, it is uncanny to realize that she does not
catch the uniqueness characterizing the event of 9/11. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain
of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
2  David Foster Wallace, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” Rolling Stone, 10/25/2001, reprinted
in Consider the Lobster And Other Essays (New York-Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
2005), 128.

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shipwreck. Nevertheless, this was not a “shipwreck with spectator,”3 in which

the latter, as advised by Lucretius’s metaphor, is able to keep a “secure distance”
from the first, a “secure distance” which, according to Kant, is the distance
required to let even a dreadful scene raise sublime feelings.4
What happened on 9/11 was not a “shipwreck with spectator,” I said. Rather,
it was a shipwreck which—as we heard—we all witnessed, feeling mutually
involved by being witnesses of the same shipwreck, feeling linked to each
other and to the shipwreck victims, and for this reason made victims our-
selves: a world whose flesh renders those who share such a world flesh, as
Merleau-Ponty teaches. Indeed, to feel mutually involved is to discover our-
selves as a strange kind of community, surprisingly recognizing as a part of
such a community even those who may exalt its massacre: it is the vertiginous
implosion of every reassuring distinction between Cain and Abel echoing—
deafeningly—the implosion of the Twin Towers.
David Foster Wallace gave us an inexhaustibly intense description of our
being witnesses of the event of 9/11, of our being witnesses of such an event all
together, as it generally, and significantly, happened:

Everybody was staring transfixed at one of the very few pieces of video
CBS never reran, which was a distant wide-angle shot of the North Tower
and its top floors’ exposed steel lattice in flames, and of dots detaching
from the building and moving through smoke down the screen, which
then a sudden jerky tightening of the shot revealed to be actual people
in coats and ties and skirts with their shoes falling off as they fell, some
hanging onto ledges or girders and then letting go, upside-down or wrig-
gling as they fell and one couple almost seeming (unverifiable) to be

3  See Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); translated by Steven Rendall as Shipwreck with
Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
4  In section 28, entitled “On Nature as a Power,” of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant
explains that “someone who is afraid can no more judge about the sublime of nature,” since
he “flees from the sight of an object that instills alarm in him,” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der
Urtheilskraft (Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich, 1790); translated by Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews as Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), § 28, 144. Nevertheless, Kant continues, the aspect of those objects
of nature which would arise dread because of their power “becomes all the more attractive
the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects
sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to
discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us cour-
age to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature” (ibid., 144–145).

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hugging each other as they fell those several stories and shrank back to
dots as the camera then all of a sudden pulled back to the long view—I
have no idea how long the clip took—[…] and everyone in the room sat
back and looked at one another with expressions that seemed somehow
both childlike and terribly old. I think one or two people made some sort
of sound. I’m not sure what else to say. It seems grotesque to talk about
being traumatized by a piece of video when the people in the video were
dying. Something about the shoes also falling made it worse.5

The terrible images of the people who jumped out of the burning Twin Towers
got stuck in our memory, inevitably and indelibly. And at the same time, with
an equal and opposite insistence, they have become the target of a long repres-
sion strategy, at least in the psychoanalytical meaning of the word repression.
Significantly enough, Wallace wrote that “CBS never reran” the “piece of video”
he was referring to. Indeed, since that day a struggle without quarter has been
engaged against the unbearable impact of this kind of images. This struggle’s
stake is that of the collective memory—“and therefore of collective forgetful-
ness,” as has been appropriately remarked6—of the event that has disturbingly
opened the twenty first century as well as its present “war of images,” as W.J.T.
Mitchell names it.7
What I would like to try to examine here is precisely the aforementioned
repression strategy—aware or unaware as it may be. However, before I start, I
shall state something that does not specifically concern those images—name-
ly, the “jumpers’ ” images, as they have been called in a clear attempt to tame
them—but regarding the event of 9/11 as such. Indeed, while preparing my
book on 9/11,8 many times I have been told as an objection that, if it were not for
its images—in this case, images generically understood—such an event would
not have been a tragedy heavier than others, which had been no doubt much
deadlier! If it were not for its images: can we really keep thinking, as Platonism

5  Wallace, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” in Consider the Lobster And Other Essays, 136.
6  Allen Feldman, “Ground Zero Point One: on the Cinematics of History” (Social Analysis,
46 (1), January 2002:110–117), later collected in Bruce Kapferer (ed.), The World Trade Center
and Global Crisis: Critical Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books 2004), 26.
7  William John Thomas Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011.
8  Mauro Carbone, Essere morti insieme. L’evento dell’11 settembre 2001 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
2007), enlarged version translated into French by Marc Logoz as Être morts ensemble:
l’événement du 11 septembre 2001 (Geneva: MētisPresses, 2013).

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has taught us, that an image is but “a second thing”9 with respect to reality,
namely something that, no matter whether added or removed, leaves reality
unchanged? It is evident that, if it were not for its images, 9/11 would have been
just another event. Actually, those considerations, rather than reducing the
weight of 9/11, shall help us to take into account seriously the intrinsic politi-
cal significance of our aesthetic-sensible relation to the world, which is clearly
one and the same with our relation to images. It is indeed because of its very
significance that this relationship does not cease to be an-(a)esthetized by
Platonism, which is, for its part, intimately animated by a will of control.

2 Repression Strategy and Temporal Therapy

On this question, one may recall what Allen Feldman, whom I already quoted
before, has remarked: that for its part, the media-system engaged in an an-
(a)esthetization of the planetary trauma of 9/11 by means of what someone
could call “a technical planning”10 of this event’s memory. In a sense, we could
state that such a planning consists in the continuous repetition of the same,
that is to say, in broadcasting over and over only the TV sequence showing the
second aircraft entering the left side of the screen and crashing into the South
Tower in a spectacular fireball. As has been highlighted, “even with hindsight,
on the occasion of the event anniversaries, for the media-system 9/11 is that
sequence.”11 That is the very sequence to which Feldman’s sharp analysis refers:

9   Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L’Oeil et l’Esprit” (Art de France, 1 [1961]), translated by Carleton

Dallery as “Eye and Mind,” revised by Michael B. Smith in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics
Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Galen Johnson, ed. (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1993), 126.
10  See Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il
mondo visibile (Rome-Bari: Laterza 2010), 62. Immediately afterwards Montani explains
that “the technological prosthesis to which we increasingly delegate the function of ‘delo-
calized sensors’ of the body are indeed reshaping the field of perceptive experience—or
even the ‘flesh’ of the world—according to rules, measures and, above all, selective canali-
zations” (ibid., 63).
11  Marco Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema (Florence: Le Lettere,
2008), 101. On the same subject, with specific reference to photographic images, see
Clément Chéroux, Diplopie. L’image photographique à l’ère des médias globalisés: essai
sur le 11 septembre 2001 (Cherbourg-Octeville: Le Point du Jour, 2009). Also, with specific
reference to Gerhard Richter’s Atlas sheet 744 (2006), “which places at the very core of
the visual montage a repetitive and often mediatized picture of the 9/11 attacks” so as
to artistically reflect on how this kind of images can prevent the work of mourning over

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“It was as if the audience was being given temporal therapy by witnessing a
mechanical sequence of events, over and over, which restored the linearity of
time, which had been suspended with the assaults.”12
It seems to me that this an-(a)esthetizing “obsessive repetition of the same
sequence”13 is complementary and convergent to that repression strategy to
which I alluded before, when referring to the images of the so-called jumpers.
And it is precisely because of the position that such images seem to occupy in
the project of building a certain collective memory of 9/11—the position of a
stumbling stone—that I would now like to let them interrogate me.
In this sense, it shall be remembered in the first place that the strategy of
their repression had already announced itself on September 12, 2001, when a
wave of indignation and protest hit The New York Times and hundreds of other
dailies all around the world for printing, on that day’s editions, the picture of
a man upside down, falling—his arms at his sides, and a leg bended—abso-
lutely composed, perfectly vertical, precisely matching with the line separating
the darker and lighter facades of the two Towers occupying the image’s whole
background; namely, the man we all have learnt to call the Falling Man.
That picture was then animatedly judged as a disgraceful journalistic abuse,
which is why it was very seldom republished, at least in the United States and in
the years immediately following the tragedy. In 2003 Tom Junod signed a long
article entitled after this picture for the Esquire magazine. The article opens by
explaining that “in the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from
the record of September 11, 2001.”14 Yet, its author, Richard Drew, a professional
photographer who on that day took several photographic series of falling bod-
ies, recalls that later on—I am still quoting from Junod’s article—“he inserted
the disc from his digital camera into his laptop and recognized, instantly, what
only his camera had seen—something iconic in the extended annihilation of
a falling man. He didn’t look at any other pictures in the sequence; he didn’t

such attacks, see Angela Mengoni and Bernhard Rüdiger, “Histoire et réalisme trauma-
tique,” in Giovanni Careri and Bernhard Rüdiger (eds.), Le Temps Suspendu (Lyon: Presses
Universitaires de Lyon, 2016), 28.
12  Feldman, “Ground Zero Point One: on the Cinematics of History”: 30. Concerning the
“linearity of time” evoked by Feldman, let me recall Heidegger’s famous definition of
“the vulgar characterization of time as an endless, irreversible succession of nows pass-
ing away,” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927); trans-
lated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), 390.
13  Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento, 98.
14  See Tom Junod, “The Falling Man,” Esquire, 140, no. 3 (2003) http://www.esquire.com/
features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN (last access: December 2016).

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have to. ‘You learn in photo editing to look for the frame,’ he says. ‘You have to
recognize it. That picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality
and symmetry.’ ”15
Thus, Richard Drew’s experience provides us with an extraordinary example
of contemporary “precarious mediation” scrambling the traditional opposi-
tions between blindness and recognition, imperfection and perfection, inhu-
man and human, as Junod remarkably synthetizes when he writes that the
photographer “recognized, instantly, what only his camera had seen.” On the
other hand, this example seems to be just a contemporary variation of what
Merleau-Ponty called “the precariousness of the silent forms of expression,”
never reabsorbing their own “contingency.”16
Paradoxically enough, in this case that precarious mediation succeeds—
as, according to Feldman, did the assaults—in suspending the “linearity” of
chronological time as well as in turning space upside down. So much that one
may wonder whether the picture was banned in spite of its formal qualities or
precisely due to them: a just question, revealing that beauty can indeed whet an
image’s atrocity, rather than mitigating it. A question which, however, shall not
make us forget a much more general truth: that the destiny of the whole visual
documentation concerning the jumpers was similar to that of the Falling Man
picture, especially in the United States. As the Esquire article points out: “In the
most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images
of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo.”17
The main adduced reason was: protecting the victims’ and their families’ pri-
vacy. As if the event was not a public tragedy. The privacy rhetoric thus served
the strategy of repression. However, such a rhetoric was implicitly disavowed
already on the occasion of the first anniversary of 9/11, when it hit not only
the visual documents, but also the artworks evoking those images. Actually, on
that occasion, a statue by the sculptor Eric Fischl (Tumbling Woman, 2002) and
a collage by the artist Sharon Paz (Falling, 2002) were rapidly removed, with
the exhibitions curators’ excuses against the public protest. A reason not so
different from the previous one: that is, speculation on grief. Implicitly mean-
ing: other people’s grief. The implicit meaning of such an implicit meaning
being: private, extremely private grief, and therefore unspeakable. The result

15  Ibid., my emphasis.

16  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence” (Les Temps Modernes,
80 (1952): 2113–2144 and 81 (1952): 70–94), translated by Michael B. Smith as “Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 115.
17   Junod, “The Falling Man,” Esquire, http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_
FALLINGMAN.

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was, in the heavy words used by Jay McInerney in The Good Life, one of the
first American novels based on the event of 9/11, which was published in 2006:
“no one else was really talking about it—there was almost a news embargo
on the jumpers. Russell said he stopped counting after twenty-seven …”18 Still,
this is a novel. Actually, Esquire specifies that, according to certain sources,
the jumpers would be more than two hundred. Well enough to induce talking
about a “mass suicide.”
The memory of “the most photographed and videotaped day in the history
of the world” thus confesses to being haunted by a paradoxical iconoclastic
will, which also ambiguously marks other fights in the present “war of images.”
The terrorist attacks against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo—as a
supposed reaction to a number of controversial Muhammad cartoons—made
that iconoclastic will tragically evident.
More precisely, 9/11 memory confesses to being haunted by the desire of
not showing, and firstly not looking at what, literally, the world never happened
to see before: namely, those deaths, or rather, those suicides, or rather, those
condemnations to suicide; a dreadfully spectacular suicide, to be committed
before everyone’s eyes. Such was in fact the suicide of many unaware and lost
singularities, rather than a “mass suicide.”
This is why the jumpers’ images are among those in which the unprecedented
essence of the 9/11 event is sedimented as that of Roland Barthes’ mother in the
picture of the winter garden evoked in Camera Lucida.19 As if in those images
such an essence had come to a transparency so dazzling as to make these very
images’ gaze unbearable. That is why one wills to repress them. Because, to-
gether with them, one may repress something of that essence that is perceived
as incompatible with that day’s kind of memory, which, since the day after,
has been laboriously built. Being seen by images makes for a very uncanny

18  “[W]atching from their window the, as he put it, ‘not-quite-tiny-enough’ figures jumping
out of the tower eight blocks away, close enough to distinguish between men and women.
That was what seemed to have upset him the most, though no one else was really talk-
ing about it—there was almost a news embargo on the jumpers. Russell said he stopped
counting after twenty-seven” (Jay McInerney, The Good Life [London: Bloomsbury,
2006], 99).
19  See Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil, 1980); trans-
lated by Richard Howard as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1981), 66–71, in particular 70: “Just an image, but a just image.” In these pages
Barthes reflects upon the recognition of the “essential identity” (66) of his mother in a
photograph of her aged five, that is, in a photograph presenting her in a way he could
never have known.

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condition. Maybe precisely this condition is a reason for the iconoclastic will I
mentioned above.

3 The Temporal Reversals of Certain Tragic Images

Of course, I do not propose to exhibit shocking pictures, nor do I suggest to

spread them in order to prevent anyone from forgetting: it is well known that
the obligation to remember—and to remember in a certain way chosen by
others—ends up obtaining results that are opposite to the purposes. In fact,
the stake here is precisely that of being allowed to remember in a way that shall
not be chosen by somebody else. For repressing a trauma rather than elaborat-
ing it seems to me extremely dangerous. This is why I think that, from those
images, we ought to start again.
This is precisely what the character inspired by the incredible shot taken
by Richard Drew does in the novel that is even titled after that very picture
(but that, mind you, never reproduces it): namely, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,
published in 2007. In the novel, a mysterious character whom only later on we
find out being a “performance artist,”20 chooses the most crowded spots of the
shocked and desperate Manhattan in the weeks following 9/11, to suddenly fall
on deaf ears, hung on a safety harness, miming the solemn composure of the
Falling Man. We are still in the first part of the novel when the lady-protagonist
sees him for the first time: “A man was dangling there, above the street, upside
down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety har-
ness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and
fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.”21
When seeing him, everybody gets angry, just as they got angry about the
picture: “Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at
him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation.”22 The
reader needs to go beyond two-thirds of the novel before the protagonist sees
the man in action again. Only then does DeLillo disseminate in the woman’s
thoughts a few words meant to seek for a sense in his actions: “Someone
falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the
word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked
planes.”23 It is then “to spread the word,” it is then to break the “embargo”
that DeLillo’s character commits himself to an image’s uncanny power, up to

20  Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York-London-Toronto-Sydney: Scribner, 2007), 219.
21  Ibid., 33.
22  Ibid.
23  Ibid., 165, my emphasis.

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the point where he turns himself into an image of that very image. Thus, he
acknowledges that such an image is not a “second thing” that would result,
platonistically, from a first thing we call “reality”—of which it would then cele-
brate the irreparable, deathly disappearance. By turning himself into an image
of that image, the mysterious character rather acknowledges that such image
has a power to make us see according to its gaze, thus contributing to the birth
of our own gaze on the world and hence contributing even to the birth of the
so-called “reality.” This very power has been sedimenting in the picture of the
Falling Man, but also in the other pictures of the so-called jumpers. Thus, can
we really accept not corresponding to the demand of witness that this kind of
image does not cease to address to us by means of their gaze?
In order to avoid this surrender, one needs to reject the “temporal therapy”
consisting in restoring chronological time’s linearity, which we heard Allen
Feldman denouncing. Thus, one may look deeper into the exploration of the
temporal reversals vortex weaving the surface of certain images. Actually, this
seems to be the answer suggested by Don DeLillo himself. Indeed, it ends up
matching with the choice of the novel’s performance artist, and hence to lead
the novel itself to a conclusion back to the event’s never really past time, so as
to spread the word this way, with its last sentence clinging to that image once
again: “then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall,
arms waving like nothing in this life.”24
With regard to the image described by a survivor of those Jews who, in
Auschwitz, were forced to “handle the death of their fellows,”25 in his Images
In Spite of All Georges Didi-Huberman wrote: “No doubt we can speak of this
image in terms of a deferred action, but on condition that we specify that the
deferred action can be formed immediately, that it can be an integral part of
the sudden appearance of the image. It instantly transforms the temporal
monad of the event into a complex montage of time. It is as though the deferred
action were contemporaneous to the action.”26
Indeed, the impact of certain scenes like the one to which we refer here
is such as to break through the present in which they produce themselves, so
as to take their need to be witnessed all the way to the edges of the future.
The impact of those scenes is such as to involve, in its very force, the future
of its revival, that is, precisely, the future of its deferment. No doubt such an

24  DeLillo, Falling Man, 246.

25  Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003); translated by Shane B.
Lillis as Images in Spite of All. Four photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 4.
26  Ibid., 30.

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interpretation accounts also for one of the temporal reversals I mentioned

with regard to the Falling Man picture, which is witnessed by Don DeLillo’s
novel too.
However, if it is true that, as we heard, the deferred action can be contem-
poraneous with the action, as Didi-Huberman states, then I believe it is also
true that the action can somehow become contemporaneous with the deferred
action, although such latter temporal reversal, which anyway remains comple-
mentary to the first, has traditionally been hidden much more than the other
by Platonism and by its derived reassuring “temporal therapy” according to
which the “after” irremediably depends on the “before.” The deadly conception
considering the image as “a second thing” is structured according to this same
logic, which is why I criticized it. However, when one looks deeper, the very
temporal reversal described by Didi-Huberman—namely, the simultaneity of
the image’s event and its future—still seems to be compatible with that logic.
Nonetheless, if “images are not a redoubling, but rather a part of the event”27—
as Jean Baudrillard stated with regard to 9/11—then they can designate also an-
other temporal reversal. In its light, coming across those images in the time of
the deferred action can simultaneously give us the precarious chance to come
across the action of the event itself. This would allow us to enter the suspended
dimension of a past, which we never actually lived as such. Still, from now on,
this past will not cease to belong to us. Or rather: from now on we will not cease
to belong to it.

4 The Mutual Precession of Reality and Images

Maurice Merleau-Ponty seems to refer to a similar temporal dynamic in his last

accomplished writing—from which I took some implicit inspiration here—
when characterizing vision as a “precession of what is upon what one sees
and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is.”28 In other
words, he describes an infinite precession of our gaze with regard to the world
and of the world with regard to our gaze, of the imaginary with regard to the
“actual”—since the imaginary deems our gaze making us see the actual—and
of the “actual” with regard to the imaginary.29 In short, this is the mutual pre-

27  Jean Baudrillard (interviewed), “Le photoreportage en son miroir,” Le Monde, 8/30/ 2003, 15.
28  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 147.
29  I have developed my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s cited definition in the section
titled “Ontology of the Image as Figure of Mutual Precession” of my book La Chair des
Images: Merleau-Ponty Entre Peinture et Cinéma (Paris: Vrin, 2011); translated by Marta

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cession we all experienced, on the one hand, by seeing within the images of
9/11 the inevitable reference to many catastrophic movies and, on the other
hand, by simultaneously realizing that “this fantasmatic screen apparition en-
tered our reality.”30
Baudrillard, too, uses the term “precession” in order to designate a retro-
flexed temporal dynamic. Still, in concluding his first writing on 9/11, The
Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard distinguishes and opposes the precession of an
event with regard to that of its possible models: “The terrorist attack corre-
sponded to a precession of the event over all interpretative models; whereas
this mindlessly military, technological war corresponds, conversely, to the
model’s precession over the event.”31 Similarly, twenty years earlier, in an essay
titled “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard already proposed a distinc-
tion and an opposition between such a precession and that of the models. The
essay opened as follows: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor sur-
vives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of
simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory.”32 According to
Baudrillard, such a precession would distinguish our epoch as “hyperreal.” Yet,
it coexists with “a logic of simulation” that, in his opinion, “is characterized by
a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact.”33
In other terms, both in the first and in the second case, Baudrillard speaks of
two opposed yet coexisting kinds of precession, whereas the Merleau-Pontian
formulation I quoted above highlights that his use of that word aims at charac-
terizing a movement of mutual anticipation of the related terms. This is how the
primacy of a term rather than the other—still implied in Baudrillard’s use of
the word precession—becomes undecidable in Merleau-Ponty’s own concep-
tion. Thus, we end up discarding the possibility of recognizing, once and for all,
which term comes first and which one has to be considered, to recall Merleau-
Ponty’s expression, a “second thing.” Indeed, this dynamic of a mutual preces-
sion starts up an infinite temporal regression. In turn, such an infinite regression

Nijhuis as The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2015), 56ff.
30  Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 16.
31  See Jean Baudrillard, “L’esprit du terrorisme” (Le Monde, 11/2/2001); translated by Chris
Turner as “The Spirit of Terrorism,” in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (London:
Verso, 2002), 34 (translation modified).
32  Jean Baudrillard, “La précession des simulacres,” in Simulacres et simulations (Paris:
Galilée, 1981); translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman as Simulations
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 2.
33  Ibid., 31–32.

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202 carbone

inevitably opens up to a peculiar kind of depth in time, eluding its chrono-

logical linearity and giving us the chance of coming across, always anew, the
events we turned out witnessing by means of certain images.
Let us take into account the sequence of images of another falling man,
which is assembled backwards by the nine-year-old protagonist of Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the end of the novel, as
well as the related passage:

Finally, I found the pictures of the falling body.

Was it Dad?
Maybe.
Whoever it was, it was somebody.
I ripped the pages out of the book.
I reversed the order, so the last one was first and the first was last.
When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up
through the sky.
And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window, back
into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that
the plane was about to come out of.
Dad would’ve left his messages backwards, until the machine was empty,
and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to
Boston.
He would’ve taken the elevator to the street and pressed the button for
the top floor.
He would’ve walked backward to the subway, and the subway would’ve
gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop.
Dad would’ve gone backward through the turnstile, then swiped his
Metrocard backward, then walked home backward as he read the New
York Times from right to left.
He would’ve spit coffee into his mug, unbrushed his teeth, and put hair
on his face with a razor.
He would’ve gotten back into bed, the alarm would’ve rung backward, he
would’ve dreamt backward.
Then he would’ve gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst
day.
He would’ve walked backward to my room, whistling “I am the Walrus”
backward.
He would’ve gotten into bed with me.

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falling man 203

We would’ve looked at the stars on my ceiling, which would’ve pulled

back their light from our eyes.
I’d have said “Nothing” backward.
He’d have said “Yeah, buddy?” backward.
I’d have said “Dad?” backward, which would have sounded the same as
“Dad” forward.
He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in
the can at the end to the beginning, from “I love you” to “Once upon a
time …”
We would have been safe.34

This text and the way in which the related images sequence is assembled
seem to be inhabited by a mutual precession of the tragic reality and the
childish imaginary, which do not cease to refer to one another, desperately
diverging and yet mutually working, as only trauma and the inconsolable de-
sire to cancel it can be. Thus, Kristiaan Versluys suggest interpreting the child’s
“imagined historical reversal as a productive way of coping with the past,”
rather than “a facile way to undo the consequences of the trauma.”35 Coming
back to Kantian terms, we could say that such a way of productively coping
with the past raises a mixed emotion, from whose violence, however, it is
impossible to defend oneself. Indeed, differently than the Kantian sublime, the
“spectator” can no longer resist becoming part of the shipwreck. Thus, if Kant
could imagine the sublime as “the boundless ocean set into a rage,”36 a 9/11
witness cannot but implicitly modify that image by writing that “[t]he grief
surrounding these columns is overwhelming and we look on as if hit by a wave
of turbulence.”37 There is no possible “secure distance” from the shipwreck. So
much the worse for us, if we think we can create it by building walls. For such a
shipwreck is not just “incredibly close,” as the title of Foer’s novel announced;
rather, it is our very own shipwreck. This is why it is inhabited by what I called a
“repression strategy.” And it is also for this reason that a war on images haunts
the present “war of images.”

34  Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006), 325–326.
35  Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 119.
36  Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 28, 144.
37  Charles Bernstein, “Report from Liberty Street,” in Ulrich Baer (ed.), 110 Stories: New York
writes after September 11 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 43–44.

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