Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates is a small book with an outsized philosophical voltage, a compact intervention whose density is not an ornament but a method. What begins as a meditation on a single historical rupture is exposed as a laboratory for testing the internal wiring of contemporary ideology, the libidinal economy of modern politics, the metaphysical presuppositions of humanitarianism, and the obscure grammar of violence that traverses both secular and religious discourses.
The text refuses the comfort of a single explanatory axis. Its momentum is not content to map causes and effects; it interrogates why certain causal maps appear seductive in the first place, why the demand to “take sides” narrows the horizon exactly when it claims to clarify it, and how the most urgent political choices are displaced onto moralized binaries that render the true alternatives unintelligible. The book’s wager is that the traumatic excess of an event like September 11 is not a brute stone weighing on thought from the outside, but a prism through which the symbolic order—law, sovereignty, market reason, media imaginaries—refracts itself, misrecognizes itself, and then seeks, through the performance of certainty, to delete the very disorientation that would force it to think.
To say that the text “steps back” from the imperative of immediate alignment is not to retreat into academic neutrality; it is to expose the libidinal structure of the alignment itself, to show how urgency organizes desire, how decision can function as a defense against understanding, and how the insistence on simplicity—friend versus enemy, civilization versus barbarism, duty versus appeasement—serves to occlude the structural complicities and shared fantasies that bind the antagonists more intimately than either can admit.
The claim, insisted upon with a steady rather than incendiary tone, is that moments of apparently crystalline choice are precisely those in which the field of possibilities is most overdetermined by inherited fantasies, those in which the demand to choose functions as a screen that protects the unconscious investments that made the catastrophe imaginable, and even, in a perverse sense, desired. Rather than compiling facts into a forensic chronology, the book functions as a theory of the event-form itself: of how the force of the “Real,” in the psychoanalytic sense, breaks into a world already saturated by images of its own collapse, and how that break is immediately sutured by narratives that allow the social body to endure by misrecognizing what has happened.
It is here that the text’s engagement with cinematic imaginaries is not mere rhetorical flourish. The insistence that late twentieth-century culture rehearsed its own fall in a proliferation of disaster films is not offered as a trivial observation, but as an index of the way the “virtual” prepared the terrain for the impact of the “actual.” The book refuses to oppose reality to simulation in a straightforward way; it asks instead how the reality principle itself has been mediated by anticipatory images that stage the collapse of the skyline, the evacuation of urban interiors, the suspension of law, the return to primal sovereignty.
The point is not that films predicted anything, but that a culture that dreams its annihilation is not blindsided when annihilation arrives; it recognizes a scene into which it can insert itself. The event is thus doubled: once as catastrophe, and once as the confirmation that the catastrophe had already been written in our cultural unconscious. The consequence is not theatrical fatalism but a critique of the ideology of innocence: if the collective imagination is saturated with fantasies of burning glass, falling towers, sacrificial revenge, and pure beginnings, then the claim that a peaceful social order has been “interrupted” must itself be interrogated. What appears as a wound from outside can also be the punctual manifestation of a long internal desire, a desire not owned by any individual, yet woven through media, markets, and the melancholic craving for a cleansing that only a disaster seems to promise.
From this perspective the book’s diagnosis of global capitalism as structurally fundamentalist is not a provocation for its own sake; it is an attempt to name a homology that conventional political discourse cannot tolerate. The vocabulary of “fundamentalism” is usually reserved for religious zeal, for doctrinal absolutism, for the transcendental warrant of violence. Yet the text insists that the market universalism of late modernity, with its demand for perpetual self-optimization, deregulatory purity, and the sacrifice of use-values to exchange-values which brooks no external limit, manifests its own absolutism—an immanent transcendence that claims to be non-ideological precisely where it is most dogmatic.
The structural core of this claim is twofold. First, the regime of capital reproduces a principle of unconditionality—growth for the sake of growth, flexibility for the sake of flexibility—whose justification does not lie in any determinate human good, but in the preservation of the system’s motion as such. Second, it renders every local form of life contingent on the volatility of abstract risks and derivative instruments, producing a sacrificial logic that can be recognized in the ethical grammar of fundamentalism: the subject who must demonstrate fidelity to an invisible absolute by offering up concrete attachments—labor guarantees, social protections, even biosocial resilience—on the altar of systemic necessity. In this light, the polemical opposition between Western secular rationality and religious absolutes dissolves, and we encounter instead two modalities of the same structural insistence on purity, two economies of sacrifice that mirror each other while disavowing the mirror.
This reframing also governs the book’s dissection of American complicity in the genesis of the adversary it then named as the embodiment of evil. The argument is neither a conspiracy narrative nor a revisionist indulgence; it is a sober reconstruction of the long intermediate causes through which an imperial strategy, pursuing proximate objectives through client networks and sacrificial proxy conflicts, incubates the very force that will later be fought as unthinkable. To note this complicity is not to moralize; it is to identify a cyclical pattern: to wage a local struggle by instrumentalizing a religious or nationalist zeal, to congratulate oneself on short-term success, and to discover—when the instrument becomes an actor in its own right—that the dialectic cannot be canceled.
Once the pattern is intelligible, the demand to choose between innocence and malignance loses its bite. The question becomes how a system that claims to secularize conflict, privatize risk, and externalize violence continually generates antagonists that re-sacralize conflict, collectivize risk, and internalize violence within the social body. The enemy is thus not an absolute other, but a figure through which a polity confronts, in inverted form, the consequences of its own strategic rationality.
In this conceptual space the most disturbing consequence of the event is less the triumph of terror than the way terror legitimizes the suspension of law in the name of law. The text is unflinching on this point. What was once treated by constitutional theory as a limit-case—the exception invoked to preserve the order—becomes the very medium of governance. This is not a purely juridical shift; it is a transformation of the ethical atmosphere. The “ticking time bomb” scenario, the seductive hypothetical that normalizes torture by turning it into an arithmetic of lives saved, does not merely tilt a balance; it rewrites the subject’s relation to guilt and responsibility.
Violence becomes prophylactic, cruelty becomes rationalized, and the darkest practices are wrapped in the luminous halo of necessity. Here the book does not oppose the sanctity of rights to the urgency of security in sentimental tones. It shows, with clinical sobriety, how the calculus that redeems the exception installs a new collective superego, one that commands the citizen to enjoy their own fear as moral vigilance, to embrace their own humiliation as patriotic maturity, to treat the degradation of the other as an expiation demanded by an abstract equation. The point is not that democracies cannot defend themselves, but that a democracy that internalizes the state of exception as its ethical norm disavows the very principle it claims to defend. The ultimate scandal is not that torture was practiced, but that its justification circulates as common sense, a pragmatic tool in the kit of citizenship.
Against this background the text’s critique of the predominant left response is most devastating where it is least polemical. There is no comfort in the obvious adversaries; there is discomfort in the mirror. The “fiasco” is not the failure to condemn, which was widespread, nor the failure to analyze, which was abundant; it is the failure to recalibrate desire. Much of the left, the book suggests with precision rather than sarcasm, remained attached to old images of protest, tactical rituals that assumed a horizon of intelligibility that the event had shattered. To denounce imperialism, to invoke historical grievances, to center structural misery—these gestures were necessary and ethically upright.
Yet in the aftermath they became insufficient not because they were wrong but because they were too right in an old register, refusing to acknowledge how the libidinal economy had shifted. The image of moral witness, of standing with the victim, of the purity of suffering, risks becoming a currency accepted precisely because it is harmless to the deeper logic of the system: the spectacle of human misery becomes one more commodity in the circulation of grievance. What is demanded instead, the book suggests, is a traversal of one’s own fascination with catastrophe, a willingness to recognize how righteous rage can mask enjoyment, how the denunciation of the other’s cruelty can displace the analysis of one’s own complicity, and how an ethics of solidarity can become an alibi that protects the subject from the anxiety of true political invention.
The theoretical machinery that allows these claims to cohere is deployed without pedantry. Psychoanalytic categories—the Real, the big Other, the dialectic of desire and enjoyment—do not function as slogans but as diagnostic instruments. The Real is not treated as an occult substance; it names the inassimilable remainder that every symbolic order must both conceal and depend upon, the traumatic kernel that returns precisely when the order attempts to immunize itself against contingency. The big Other is not a person or a conspiracy; it is the register of legitimacy that sustains the belief that there is a place where meaning is guaranteed, where actions receive their ultimate authorization.
In a world in which the market often plays that role—transmuting risk into price, injustice into information—the collapse of a visible sign of domination exposes the fragility of that guarantee. The reflex is twofold: to restore the guarantee by doubling down on surveillance, securitization, and sacrificial legality, or to fetishize the collapse itself as a purifying revelation. The text refuses both paths. Its sobriety resides in maintaining the vertigo long enough to think what a politics would be that neither delegates meaning to an abstract system nor half-consciously longs for the purgative that would erase the burden of complexity.
Within this framework the question of the neighbor returns with unsettling force. The command to love one’s neighbor, so often invoked as the antidote to geopolitical hate, is analyzed at the point where ethical injunction crosses into monstrosity. The neighbor is not the charming other that liberal multiculturalism teaches us to respect at a distance; the neighbor is the bearer of an opaque enjoyment, a being whose proximity reveals the limits of tolerance precisely when tolerance is treated as an all-purpose solution. To name this is not to license hatred; it is to insist that ethics begins where the pleasure of one’s moral image fails, where the other’s enjoyment resists domestication.
The neighbor intersects with the figure of the homo sacer—not in a facile theoretical collage, but in order to underscore how the modern order oscillates between two poles: the figure stripped to “bare life,” exposed to sovereign power without political protection, and the figure saturated with dangerous enjoyment, whose difference appears as a threat that must be regulated, surveilled, or expelled. The political task, the book implies, is to break this oscillation, to refuse both the emptying of the other into neutralizable life and the demonization of the other as the incarnation of uncanny jouissance.
It is in this light that the meditation on sovereignty, detention, and the normalization of extralegal power acquires its full weight. The book neither declaims against abuses in a prophetic tone nor resigns itself to a realist ethics of lesser evils. Instead, it charts how the line that separates constitution from emergency is eroded by practices that install permanent liminality: detention that is outside law yet administratively regular; interrogations that are illegal yet authorized by secret memos; wars that are warlike yet refuse the name of war. The catastrophe offers the justification, but the deeper engine is the desire of a polity to inhabit a fantasy of purity—of being the place where law originates rather than the place where law is answerable. The “desert” in the title is thus double: the annihilated cityscape whose dust we saw in endless loops, and the symbolic desert that appears when a society renounces the labor of mediation, preferring the immediacy of decision, the clarity of command, the comfort of necessity. The book does not celebrate ambiguity; it insists that mediation—institutions, procedures, accountability—is not a luxury but the very medium of freedom. To sacrifice it in the name of survival is to abolish what one claims to preserve.
A complementary strand, at once sociological and phenomenological, concerns the peculiar happiness that attaches to tragedy. The text is fearless in diagnosing the obscene underside of solidarity: the exhilaration of unity in the face of threat, the restoration of meaning to lives otherwise fragmented by market precarity, the sense of being needed, of participating in a historical drama that justifies sacrifice. To register this is not to mock grief or belittle courage; it is to reveal how fragile the social bond had become if it requires catastrophe to feel real.
In this frame the proliferation of charity, of volunteerism, of civic rituals becomes legible as an economy of enjoyment: giving becomes an instrument for managing anxiety, volunteering becomes a choreography that reassures the subject that there is an order in which they have a place. Once again the analysis is not cynical; it is diagnostic. The book asks whether a politics that depends on disaster for its intensity is not condemned to reproduce the structures that make disaster the condition of meaning. A mature politics, it suggests, would find ways to mobilize collective intelligence and solidarity without the sacrificial fuel of catastrophe, to produce intensity without enemies.
Throughout, the text’s style models the discipline it recommends. It is polemical without moral theater, theoretical without jargon for its own sake, and, crucially, consistently suspicious of its own satisfactions. When it exposes the complicities of power, it quickly turns the lens back on the pleasures of critique. When it devastates sentimental pieties, it pauses to ask what anxiety those pieties pacify. When it defends universality against cultural relativism, it resists turning universality into a new particularism disguised as a principle. The movement is dialectical in the strict sense: propositions are tested against their negations, placed in contexts where they reveal their contingency, then reconstructed as determinate negations—insights that have passed through their own refutation and returned enriched rather than weakened. The result is not a theory “of” September 11 but a theory of modernity that takes September 11 as an index case, a lens through which to see the logical structure of our ethical and political reflexes.
If one were to name a single argumentative gesture that unifies the work, it would be the refusal of pure opposition. The book neither excuses violence nor idealizes the system it attacks; it refuses to imagine that the purity of one’s position follows from the impurity of one’s opponent. This refusal governs its analysis of religious zeal and market rationality, of humanitarian desire and militarized sovereignty, of cinematic fantasy and political reality. It is not that the world is a gray mess of equivalences; it is that the structure of the antagonism is more interesting than the slogans that purport to represent it.
By insisting that global capitalism is structurally fundamentalist, the book does not claim that markets and religions are interchangeable; it claims that the logic of unconditionality functions in both, and that this shared logic explains why their conflict is so intractable: each recognizes in the other a distorted image of its own demand for purity. By insisting that American policy was complicit in the rise of its enemy, the book does not claim that cause and effect are symmetrical; it claims that imperial strategy breeds forms of subjectivity that cannot be disowned when they return. By insisting that the event was preimagined in cinema, the book does not claim that images cause reality; it claims that images organize our readiness for certain realities and our blindness to others. Each of these claims wagers that thinking is harder than choosing sides, and that the courage to think is a political virtue.
Because of this theoretical architecture, the book’s continued relevance—despite its origin in the immediate aftermath and its circulation in editions from the first half of the 2000s—follows not from new data but from the persistence of the structures it describes. The virtualization of daily life has only intensified the circuit between screen and event; the economy of exception has normalized administrative states that oscillate between deregulated markets and hyperregulated bodies; the ethical atmosphere of lesser-evil calculus has migrated from clandestine memos to everyday talk; the rhetoric of universality continues to struggle against the capture of universality by particular hegemonies; the figure of the neighbor has been reinvoked under new names—migrant, algorithmic other, epidemiological risk—without the anxiety it carries being symbolically processed. Even as the geopolitical theatres rotate, the analytic schema retains its diagnostic power because it is less an account of this or that policy than a map of the junction where enjoyment, belief, and power interlock.
The durability of the analysis is especially visible in the way the book treats communication. The point is not that media “lie,” but that truth and lie are categories too weak to grasp how images furnish a world with the very coordinates that determine what can be seen. The saturation of attention by catastrophe does not numb only; it calibrates desire, telling subjects what to fear in order to know who they are. In such a regime, the demand for “authenticity” becomes a marketing category, “transparency” becomes a technique for managing trust, and the spectacle of debate takes on the form of an algorithmic exchange that polarizes not because malicious agents intend polarization—though they may—but because polarization is the affective fuel for engagement, which is the metric that governs value.
The book’s insistence that the real alternatives are hidden at moments of apparent clarity acquires a new sharpness here: clarity itself is a product, a design, a carefully tuned exposure of a narrow band of the spectrum that allows a social body to continue without confronting the loss of guarantees. The antidote is not the fantasy of a view from nowhere; it is the slow reconstruction of institutions, practices, and languages that allow the common to be spoken without being captured by the commodity form.
Nor does the text shy from the question of violence as such. Its conceptual rigor allows it to distinguish between subjective eruptions—acts to which we attribute agency, intent, moral valence—and the objective violence of structures whose daily operation destroys forms of life without dramatizing the destruction. The point is not to exculpate subjective cruelty but to insist that the refusal to see structural violence is itself a form of complicity.
In a culture that demands visible perpetrators and visible victims, the book asks what it would mean to build a political imagination capable of detecting destruction that does not advertise itself, that registers only in the statistical shifts in mortality, the quiet increase in despair, the normalization of expendability. The coupling of this analysis with a psychoanalytic account of enjoyment is what gives the diagnosis its distinctive timbre: the system persists not only because it is powerful, but because it supplies forms of enjoyment that are both intoxicating and humiliating. To name those forms is the beginning of freedom.
The figure of reappropriation, which the book tracks with exemplary subtlety, condenses much of this logic. Signs circulate, are stolen, reversed, emptied, filled. Gestures once subversive are commodified as lifestyle; slogans once emancipatory are redeployed as management tools; religious symbols are inverted by secular states in rituals of purification that do not admit their liturgical form. This is not a lament for a lost authenticity; it is an acknowledgment that politics under late modernity is conducted on a terrain where every sign is already contested, where the fight is not to speak the truth into a void but to occupy the machinery that determines how speech is recognized as truth. The lesson is severe: to critique without organizing is to contribute to the circulation; to organize without critique is to fall prey to the very machinery one hopes to redirect. The book’s practical implication, then—implicit rather than preached—is that politics must become patient again, that it must refuse the false urgency that demands immediate purity, and instead build the infrastructure of meaning—education, unions, associations, media—that can anchor a collective subject not governed by the adrenaline of catastrophe.
If an objection might be raised, it would be that the text—so committed to diagnosing complicity, ambivalence, and the unconscious economies of desire—sometimes risks blunting the edge of moral reaction. By insisting that enemies mirror each other, one could worry that the book instrumentalizes suffering for theoretical elegance. Yet the objection dissipates if one grants the book its central premise: that to do justice to suffering requires us to refuse those satisfactions—moral clarity purchased too quickly, catharsis that relieves without changing—that would turn suffering into a currency. The demand is stern: to refuse both cynicism and consolation, to think without completing the thought into a slogan, to remain exposed to the contingency of the world without seeking shelter in theology disguised as political science. In this discipline resides the book’s peculiar compassion: it respects victims by refusing to convert them into rhetorical talismans; it honors the dead by demanding a politics that would render their sacrifice unnecessary, not by sacralizing the necessity of sacrifice.
It is appropriate, then, that the text’s concluding movements orbit the problem of love—a word that liberal pieties have dulled and religious certainties have weaponized. Love, here, is not sentiment but a name for the capacity to construct a world with others whose opacity is not eliminated but sustained as the very condition of the bond. Love of the neighbor is not the warm bath of recognition; it is a labor that acknowledges how frightening the neighbor’s enjoyment is, and yet insists that a common life can be built without purifying the other into a mirror of the self. This insistence, translated into politics, becomes a refusal of identitarian closure and imperial universality alike: the universal is what is built between incompossible particulars, not what subsumes them. If the book remains after two decades as urgent as when it first appeared, it is because this definition of the universal—to be constructed, fragile, revisable, exacting—has yet to be institutionalized at scale. We remain, as the text foretells, tempted by shortcuts: purity, exception, sacrificial clarity. The work of building the middle—mediations, norms, habits of listening, forms of accountability that neither humiliate nor flatter—feels slow in the shadow of catastrophe. Yet only that work can make catastrophe cease to be the condition of meaning.
To read Welcome to the Desert of the Real today, with the knowledge that it emerged in 2005 as a crystallization of essays written in the immediate aftermath and related dates, is to encounter not a dated tract but an anatomy. What has aged are some names and theatres; what has not aged are the structures. The virtualization of life has only deepened; the economy of exception has sedimented; the moralization of policy has intensified; the commodification of outrage has become a business model; the neighbor has become the site of renewed phantasmatic production; the oscillation between bare life and dangerous enjoyment continues to authorize both abandonment and repression. The book’s unique contribution is to give us a language precise enough to name these structures without fetishizing them, supple enough to move between theory and image, and courageous enough to examine the enjoyment of the examiner. In doing so, it exemplifies a form of criticism that neither celebrates its own acuity nor withdraws into superior despair. It proposes instead that thinking—patient, dialectical, unflinching—is itself a form of political practice, a refusal to let the field of possibilities be decided by the very fantasies that institute our catastrophes.
One might finally say that the book is a manual for living without guarantees. It teaches how to endure the loss of the big Other without collapsing into cynicism or compensatory aggression; how to take responsibility for complicity without becoming paralyzed by guilt; how to acknowledge the pleasures that structure our politics without capitulating to them; how to love the neighbor without erasing what makes the neighbor terrifying; how to defend institutions without sacralizing them; how to accept that mediation is not a betrayal of authenticity but its only worldly form. These lessons are not detachable from the event that occasioned them, yet they travel well because they are not hostage to that event’s particulars. The desert named in the title is not a metaphor only for ruins; it is a name for the space in which we must build when the fantasies that sustained us have burned away. In that space, clarity is earned rather than imposed, courage is quiet rather than theatrical, and politics becomes, once more, the art of making a world with others whose truth we will never fully know.
Simon Gros 
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