Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Reversed Rapture:
On Salvation, Suicide, and
the Spirit of Terrorism
Diego Cagüeñas
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Light is the protagonist in Drew’s Falling Man, just as much as it is in Paul Chan’s
The 7 Lights.1 However, as the name of the series indicates, Chan is concerned
with light that has been “struck out,” a kind of light that illuminates and obscures,
that has as much to do with sharp contours as with vanishing shadows. Six years
after the collapse of the Twin Towers, a different kind of light illuminated a world
deeply entrenched in a spurious “war on terror” and the fear against a phantasmal,
1. From May 15 to July 1, 2007, the Serpentine Gallery presented Paul Chan’s first solo exhibi-
tion in the United Kingdom and the world premiere of the complete series The 7 Lights (2005 – 7).
It can be seen on their website: www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/paul-chan-7 – lights.
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2. Briefly, in Christian eschatology the rapture refers to the belief that either before, or simulta-
neously with, the second coming of Jesus Christ to Earth, believers who have died will be raised or
believers who are still alive and remain shall be caught up together with the resurrected dead believ-
ers in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (McKim 2014: 262).
3. The following five Lights follow pretty much the same script: we see endless repetitions of
floating objects, animals — mostly birds — and people as they enter, traverse, and exit the lighted
space. Seventh Light operates differently; it is not a digital projection. As the exhibition website
explains, it recasts the entire series of projections as a musical composition, imagining the tension
between lightness and darkness as silence and sound. My analysis does not consider this last Light.
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The profound impression that Chan’s 1st Light left me with compelled me to the
National September 11 Memorial the day after my visit to the Whitney Museum.
I had been there before, but I felt I needed to see it with new eyes. It was the
middle of the summer, and the sky was as bright and blue as on that unforgettable
date. It was a gorgeous day. The strict security checkpoints of a year earlier had
been lifted, and people were free to move about. Under the burning sun, visitors
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5. For example, 9/11: Phone Calls from the Towers and Voices from Inside the Towers are two
documentaries that provide an inside perspective to what happened on 9/11 through phone calls and
phone messages left by those trapped inside the buildings.
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When United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m., there was no
doubt that history was being made and unmade. That is when it became clear that
the first crash had been no accident. Up until that moment it was evident that we
were witnessing something of local significance, but after the second crash there
was a break in Western history that suddenly and drastically turned upside down
Western accepted cosmology. In this regard allow me to quote at some length
Claude Lefort’s reflections: “It is while the event is still a living memory that there
arises a feeling that a break has occurred, but that it not occurred within time, that
it establishes a relationship between human beings and time itself, that it makes
history a mystery; that it cannot be circumscribed within the field of what are
termed political, social, or economic institutions; that it establishes a relationship
between human beings and the institution itself; that it makes society a mystery”
(2006: 148). A double mystery then: history and society become mysterious for
human beings.
For Lefort, this is the result of the French Revolution’s secularizing thrust.
Something that is experienced as coming from outside time and social institu-
tions severs the ties between human beings and any kind of transcendental hori-
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