Clouds: On a Possible Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics

Abstract

Throughout history, clouds have both defined and dislocated the borders separating earth from sky, this world from the next. But in so doing, they have also cast their shadows—for they are almost always singularly plural, to use Jean-Luc Nancy's formulation—upon the earth and obscured the heavens that they appear to protect and to dissimulate. In the twentieth century, as the immanentizing of the transcendent approaches a cataclysmic culmination, this ambivalent signification of clouds reaches new heights—and depths. This essay retraces two such emergences: the clouds through which Hitler's plane flies at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and the clouds of rubble that cover the streets of lower Manhattan upon the collapse of the Twin Towers in visual images that continue to circulate in the media. In a larger study under way, a subsequent text will discuss an obvious missing link between these two groups of clouds: the mushroom clouds rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.