Slavoj Zizek – A Pervert’s Guide to Family

“Here, then, is where we are five years later: still unable to locate 9/11 into a large narrative, to provide its “cognitive mapping.” Of course, there is the official story according to which, the permanent virtual threat of the invisible Enemy legitimizes preemptive strikes: precisely because the threat is virtual, it is too late to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense. The difference of the War on Terror with previous XXth century world-wide struggles like the Cold War is that while, in the preceding cases, the enemy was clearly identified as the positively-existing Communist empire, the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the characterization of the figure of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: “Most people have a dark side… she had nothing else.” Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side … the terrorist threat has nothing else…”