ON REFLECTI NG ABSENCE:

NEGATI VI TY AND THE S ACRED

AT GROUND ZERO
David Le

Abstract
The opening of Michael Arads Reecting Absence, the National September
11th Memorial, in New York offers an occasion to think through the
aesthetic strategies of negativity that have come to dene this memorial as
a paradigmatic countermemorial. This article investigates how and why the
operative metaphors of the void, absence, and deconstruction have come to
serve as the under-determined (to borrow a phrase from one of the me-
morials jurists) civic codes of that which is putatively universal and sacred
in this context. The challenge will be to get some purchase on a complex
question: What are we to make of the apparent paradox of a deconstructivist,
sacred countermemorial lying at the heart of a secular, global-corporatist
fantasia, the World Trade Center? While the memorial suggests an appealing
conceptual model for the pluralistic accommodation of incompatible com-
mitments, in the era of globalisation and terror, we might need to examine
the material and political conditions of this putative absence.
Consequently the primary purpose behind such explicit independent buildings is
only the erection of something which is a unifying point for a nation or nations, a
place where they assemble. Yet along with this is the subordinate aim of making
obvious, by the mode of conguration, what does in general unify men: the
religious ideas of peoples. These then provide at the same time a more specic
content for such works to express symbolically.
G.W.F. Hegel, Independent or Symbolic Architecture
1
[Every] nihil negativum or absolute nothing, if subordinated to a higher concept,
will appear as a mere nihil privativum or relative nothing, which can always change
signs with what it negates, so that that would then be thought of as negation, but
it itself as afrmation.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Fullness of Nothingness
2

Religious Studies, Brown University, Box 1927, 59 George St. Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Email: david_le@brown.edu
Literature & Theology, Vol. 27. No. 4, December 2013, pp. 452471
doi:10.1093/litthe/frt040
Literature & Theology # The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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The opening of Reecting Absence, the National September 11th Memorial, in
New York offers an occasion to think through the aesthetic strategies of
negativity that have come to dene this memorial as a paradigmatic
countermemorial. Michael Arads Reecting Absence emerged from a global
competition that began in April 2003 and ended with the announcement
of his selection in January 2004. The guidelines for that competition asked
its entrants to create an original and powerful statement of enduring and
universal symbolism
3
in order to respect space made sacred through tra-
gedy.
4
This article investigates how and why the operative metaphors of
the void, absence, and deconstruction have come to serve as the under-
determined
5
(to borrow a phrase from one of the memorials jurists) civic
codes of that which is putatively universal and sacred in this context. The
challenge will be to get some purchase on a complex question: What are we
to make of the apparent paradox of a deconstructivist, sacred countermemorial
lying at the heart of a secular, global-corporatist fantasia, the World Trade
Center (WTC)? In part this will be to ask if this avowed nihil negativum may
reappear as a nihil privativum once we recognise how its negations are them-
selves particular (and, more troublingly, interested). Such a determination
need not earn our condemnation, but it demonstrates a practical contradiction
between theories of absence and absences mobilisation. Whether or not our
political, ethical, and religious commitments drive us to articulate a new nihil
negativum, we ought rst subordinate Reecting Absence to a higher concept and
consider its change of signs.
I will conclude, nally, on a note of ambivalence. While the memorial is a
powerful statement and while it does, I think, respect space made sacred
through tragedy we must question its universal symbolism. I mean to ask
what this talk of absence has been about, and if, in the era of globalisation and
terror, we might need to rethink our commitment to tropes of absence as
(non)responses to disaster.
The focus of this work is the National September 11th Memorial, Reecting
Absence, which opened on the 10th anniversary of the attacks in downtown
Manhattan. At present, the museum, which is meant to be a vital counterpart
to the memorial, has not yet opened. What is open to the public now is a large
site, roughly eight acres in size, occupying roughly half of the 16 acres for-
merly called Ground Zero. The redevelopment of the site began a few
months after the Twin Towers and the suite of other structures that consti-
tuted the WTC were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
Now, more than a decade later, some public and civic life has returned to this
area, which remains a large and active construction site. With the top oors of
One WTC (formerly the Freedom Tower) in place, and the memorial open,
the vision wrought in the aftermath of September 11th for Lower Manhattan
has begun to take shape.
453 NEGATIVITY AND SACRED AT GROUND ZERO

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Reecting Absence, designed by Michael Arad and set in a plaza designed by
landscape architect Peter Walker, consists of two enormous square depressions
measuring 170 feet on each side, at the centres of which lie two deeper
square depressions, described by Arad as voids. Approaching either of the
depressions, one is immediately struck by their magnitude: they are each
individually over an acre in size and the water that pours more than 30 feet
from (roughly) street level into the rst, lower level constitutes one of the
worlds largest man-made waterfalls. One rst hears the sound of the water,
an ambient cloud meant, according to Arad, to envelop the viewer and create
a sense of intimacy, screening out the noise from around the site. Surrounding
the falls stands a large brass parapet in which the names of the dead
are inscribed. Water rst rises from behind these parapets before streaming
over a serrated weir tilted at 45 degrees, which directs the water down into
the calming pool below. From there, the water settles before cascading down
the internal voids, the bottoms of which are not visible to the viewer.
The memorial is sheathed in black granite rectangular blocks, offering a
rigid geometric frame against the uid, changing appearance of the water as
it ows through the memorial.
454 DAVID LE

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Adjacent to these pools is the entrance to the subterranean museum (which
picks up on the motif of overlapping, non-orthogonal grids Daniel Libeskind
used in his WTC master plan design
6
) and a structure that houses the pumps,
electrical works, and heaters that keep the fountains running. Arad has noted
that the minimalism of his design did not allow for the hiding of the memor-
ials technical apparatus within the memorial itself.
The names of the 2,983 victims killed (including passengers on the four
downed ights, ofce workers present at the site, rescue responders, and those
killed in the 1993 terrorist attacks) were originally to be arranged randomly,
representing the randomness of the attacks themselves. Many were concerned
with how loved ones might nd those who were lost at the site, and others
complained that this randomness would rob rst responders of a formal rec-
ognition of their civic status. Ultimately, the design team of the memorial was
able to contact family and friends of the deceased in order to arrange them
through what the design team calls meaningful adjacency: reghters, for
example, could be grouped by company, while, elsewhere, relative strangers
who died together had their names placed together by their families.
In fact, the traces of multiple constituencies, including local residents, the
families of those killed in the attacks, and rescuer organisations are present in a
variety of spaces within the site, and in particular, the memorial. These fac-
tions had competing visions of how the sites sacredness ought to be formally
recognised. Consider, for example, the public disputes about whether rst
responders should receive some visual distinction in the memorial, or, much
earlier, whether anything should be built on any of the 16 acres at all. And yet
these varied positions all take place under the shared presupposition that the
space is in fact sacred. Differences of opinion related to the determinate
whichness of the sacreds representation, not its thatness. This achieved consen-
sus, though rarely commented on, is the condition of any explicit determin-
ation of the civic sacred. In this way the sacred exists, minimally and
necessarily, as the socially and politically designated reason for and cause of
the sites spatial conguration.
Again, regardless of the plural and incompatible accounts of what the sacred
is, a general consensus was reached that it was present at Ground Zero, and
that this merited some special formalisation. The debate over particulars (how
to formalise) can only be accomplished against a general background of con-
sent (that the sacred is and ought to be formalised). At a minimum, the sacred
operates in and as the socially instituted category that both authenticates and
is authenticated through the mutual recognition of its claimants.
This is distinctly not a perennialist account of some putatively universal
sacred existing independent of its cultural modes. Indeed, I am suggesting
that the sacred is instantiated where it is claimed and (if it is to have suasive
force) mutually recognised. To be clear, on this minimal and necessary
455 NEGATIVITY AND SACRED AT GROUND ZERO

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account, the sacreds existence is in no way guaranteed apart from its social,
practical, and discursive performance (whether this is a sufcient account of
the sacred is an open question). We would be mistaken, however, to think
that its performative status prevents the sacred from playing a substantive role
in social life. In fact, the sacred as socially instituted category allows those
who mobilise it to justify a host of practices that would otherwise be
impossible.
7
At Ground Zero, one might therefore look at how property
rights, ritual activity, and affect manifest themselves differently relative
to their sacred status without presuming that any one of these is criterially
sufcient to establish sacredness or fundamentally what sacredness really is.
Our focus will be architectural.
Here, I am interested in how late 20th-century design strategiesprimarily
those identied as deconstructivist and countermemorial gure the sacred as
absence. These two strategies emerge as responses to different (though related)
ethical, political, and aesthetic concerns. We will treat these below. In roughly
Hegelian terms, I will suggest that the formalised negativity of the decon-
structivist countermemorial is, in fact, the positive form under which a con-
temporary, pluralistic, civic sacred has come to appear. Relativised to these
determinate political problems, the putative absolute negation is rendered
privative, enabling the change of signs. The ethical and political stakes of
this reversal are fraught, but we should rst understand how and why the nihil
negativum came to have its appeal, before we address its limits as an unintended
nihil privativum.
I . DECONSTRUCTI VI SM: TOWARDS A CERTAI N EXPERI ENCE
OF THE I MPOSSI BLE
It might be helpful to use Daniel Libeskinds master plan as an occasion to
think through deconstructivism and its appeal as a memorial strategy. When
speaking of the memorial, we should be acutely aware that the events of
September 11th have in fact been memorialised in the broad master plan of
Daniel Libeskind, as well as the memorial proper. Although we will ultimately
return to Arads design, it will serve us to consider the context of the
Libeskind master plan, particularly because Libeskind established parameters
for the memorial relating to scale, placement, orientation, and even, as would
become crucial, the Towers footprints.
The Libeskind master plan developed from the unbroken quadrilateral
of the 16-acre site. First, Libeskind set apart the area in the south-western
quadrant where the towers had stood. In a recent radio interview, Libeskind
noted that the area is a piece of real estate, but theres something special
about it, it is sacred ground. When asked what sacred ground meant
to him, he replied (somewhat indirectly), I decided not to build where the
456 DAVID LE

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towers stood. I thought it was not possible to just build buildings there
because now its a special place.
8
In his terms, the sacred space of the
site demanded some recognition of its differenceone could not just build
buildings there.
9
After the partitioning of the memorial space, Libeskind traced the relative
position of the sun to the towers at 8:46 AM and 10:28 AM, the interval
in which the North Tower was rst struck and then when it collapsed
(the South Tower was struck second but fell rst, so this was the period
in which both towers may be said to have been hit and have collapsed).
The triangle formed in this way yielded what Libeskind called the Wedge
of Light, a triangular shape incised into the site, which constitutes a primary
axis around which other structures on the site are oriented. The wedge orients
the main atrium of Santiago Calatravas transportation hub, for example,
such that the windows that run up its spine will be directly illuminated
near future September 11ths. (Astronomical time is out of synch with our
calendar, so these solar alignments will not in fact correspond to the proper
calendar date). The Wedge of Light is meant to be illuminated without
shadow on this date.
Around the central memorial plaza, a ring of towers of progressively shorter
heights will stand, beginning with 1 WTC (rising to the symbolic height of
1,776 feet at its spires height, with its terminal oor matching the original
height of the Twin Towers) at roughly 12 oclock and then revolving clock-
wise. This spiral-like design is meant, rst, to frame the memorial, and second,
to provide a monumental echo of the Statue of Libertys torch. In the original
master plan, the ring of towers surrounding the memorial are oblique and
truncated, their exteriors cloaked in Libeskinds trademark, non-orthogonal
grids. It is as though the negative force of the footprints has deranged the
simple, orthogonal space of the traditional ofce park.
In a presentation of his plan presented at the CUNY Graduate Center in
October 2011, Libeskind sketched his design process, beginning with the
initial partitioning of the memorial plaza.
10
He described this initial partition-
ing as related to his phrase, memory foundations, which he described as the
key to the site, serving both as a source of memory and an afrmation of
life. In a series of slides showing his design process, he titled the nal sketch
Life Victorious. The master plan spatialises a temporality, beginning with, in
Libeskinds terms, memory foundations and resolving itself in a nal moment
of life victorious: in this way the footprints dene the immobile axis around
which the ring of towers progress. The progression of towers inverts the
downward ow of the memorial. Where the memorial presents a melan-
cholic, unclosing wound, 1 WTC not only restores the building height of
the Towers, but also provides a surplus, bringing the new tower height to
1,776 feet: Life Victorious relative to Reecting Absence.
457 NEGATIVITY AND SACRED AT GROUND ZERO

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Libeskinds design exemplies strategies he has pursued elsewhere and, most
famously, in his Jewish Museum in Berlin. There the fragmentary planes of
the museums form evoked the rupturing nature of the Holocaust in human
history. The form of the museum cuts into space, with its internal as well as
external structure disjointed. The impossibility of constructing an adequate
structure in which to formalise, narrativise, and symbolise the Holocaust
yielded a museum whose aggressive form resists the complacency and closure
of the traditional museum.
11
While these design strategies were met with critical and popular success in
the case of Berlin Jewish Museum, the deployment of Libeskinds signature
shards elsewhere has raised questions about the relationship between his formal
designs and their conceptual underpinnings. The operatic space of the Jewish
Museum may have been successful, but the redeployment of its formal
elements in admixture with crass nationalist symbolism (the 1,776-foot
Freedom Tower, the echo of the Statue of Liberty) has raised issues about
the ethical, political, and philosophical dimensions of the problem. That this
bellicose, nationalist architecture with claims to the sacred should come from
an architect whose work has largely been a response to the last centurys
nationalist nightmare is cause for concern.
Libeskind is often associated with the development of architectural decon-
structivism, a design philosophy related to Derridean deconstruction, though by
no means identical to it.
12
Simply put, Libeskind deploys a deconstructive
programme inasmuch as his work seeks to disclose the impossibility of certain
458 DAVID LE

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architectural pretensions. In Derridas terms, we might say that Libeskinds
work throws into crisis the archetype of architecture as a xed, complete,
whole structure.
13
It remains deconstructive because its operations decompose
the structure through an examination of its necessary, but ultimately self-
contradictory premises; it thus undermines modernisms characterisation
of architecture as a kind of science and its concomitant visual language of
abstraction, purity, and formalism. In the case of the Jewish Museum, the
premise of the arche-museum as a form in which the past is mastered and
contained in a total representation, and where the caesura of the Holocaust
could be sutured, was exposed as an impossibility. At the same time, the
museum, reframed as the necessary trace against which this impossibility is
made visible, was built. An ethical commitment to represent the problems
of representation cannot, obviously, avoid representation itself. This is the
architectural challenge that has found appealing philosophical resources in
deconstruction.
If this gives us some sense of why deconstructivism might offer a viable
approach to some architectural problems, it is not entirely clear how it might
serve as a more generalisable mode of memorial response. While the putative
exceptionalism of the Holocaust supports formal attempts at recognising its
ungurabilty, it is not clear that such a response is always appropriate. Indeed,
the language of the Holocausts exceptionalism would seem at odds with the
subsumption of other historical events by the same conceptual means. Once
Holocaustal ungurability can be predicated of other events, the putative
exceptionalism of the Holocaust is denied; it is no longer, strictly speaking,
sui generis.
On the one hand, we might wish to endorse the view that memory is, in
fact, always somewhat traumatic. This view is frequently invoked in Memory
Studies to explain why memory and forgetting are always intertwined, and
how we can only gesture towards the ideal memorial, while recognising that it
cannot be built. This would, incidentally, render the Holocaust quantitatively,
rather than qualitatively exceptional. On the other hand, the tropes of trauma,
excess, and unrepresentability can remove historical events from the legible
historical causes that gave rise to them. This can have the irksome effect
of transcendentalising entirely immanent processes and removing them from
the plane of political contest. It is perhaps for this reason that the deconstruc-
tivist memorials, are often married to museums, which provide the positive
supplement meant to augment the un/representation of their deconstructivist
memorial counterparts. We will return to these questions of trauma and the
ethics of representation with respect to some concrete examples.
The problem is that deconstructivist openness remains open to being co-
opted by interests that seem out of line with the ethical motives we (perhaps
improperly) impute to it. Without positive content, this purely negative mode
459 NEGATIVITY AND SACRED AT GROUND ZERO

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risks tacitly afrming that which it should reject: it is possible that a nonre-
sponse can itself be subordinated to a high concept, then change signs and
reappear as determinate silence when an active response is demanded.
If Libeskinds Jewish museum may be seen as exemplifying an authentic
deconstructive critique, his WTC master plan strikes many, and I include
myself here, as an inauthentic version. This is to say that while the Jewish
Museum seems to represent a kind of negativity that is irrecuperable, the
symbolic perturbations of the WTC master plan are worn lightly over a
nationalist, global-capitalist plan. That Libeskinds deconstructivism could
become a style perhaps signals that it had already passed away as a genuinely
deconstructive project. As Derrida warned:
For a deconstructive operation, possibility is rather the danger, the danger of
becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible
approaches. The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may
have, is a certain experience of the impossible, in other words, as the only possible
invention.
14
If, as I will argue, Arads work achieves a certain experience of the impos-
sible, I fear that Libeskinds design leans on an available set of rule-governed
procedures, methods and accessible approaches. To his credit, Libeskind
does, however, suggest that we are to read his work through Arads. Arads
design, then, may help us to think through how such an experience of the
impossible might be more successfully induced.
I I . TRAUMA, PLURALI SM, HEGEMONY
Reecting Absence employs a set of design strategies that have come to be
recognised as counter memorial or counter monumental. Counter-
memorials are a kind of memorial that emerged in the last quarter of the
20th century that sought to address the ethical perils of what Andreas Huyssen
calls antimonumentalism. He has specied some of these concerns:
[The monumental] is politically suspect because it is seen as representative of
nineteenth century nationalisms and twentieth century totalitarianisms. It is
socially suspect because it is the privileged mode of expression of mass movements
and mass politics. It is ethically suspect because in its preference for bigness it
indulges in the larger-than-human, in the attempt to overwhelm the individual
spectator. It is psychoanalytically suspect because it is tied to narcissistic delusions
of grandeur and to imaginary wholeness.
15
As a corollary, I would add, following Huyssens formulation: monuments are
also socially suspect in that they often idolise particular gures, lets call them
460 DAVID LE

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Great White Men, whose privileged race, class, gender, and sexuality are
incompatible with current, pluralistic, democratic imperatives. Furthermore,
inasmuch as the tradition of Great White Men and their Great White
Monuments has frequently been appropriated by Christian American iconog-
raphy, it is incompatible with certain forms of secularism inasmuch as these
monuments privilege Protestant Christian American religion.
American national monumentality was inaugurated by gures including
Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Charles LEnfant, whose neo-classicism dened
an ordered, balanced representation of American national space. These neo-
classicists were dedicated to a particular progressivist account of Western his-
tory, beginning with a metonymic Greece as origin of Western thought and
democracy. A distinctively American inection, often invoking American
exceptionalism and Protestant ideals of the city on the hill, offered related
monumental referents.
16
At the turn of the last century and in the wake of the
First World War, the Beaux-Arts, City Beautiful style of what Lewis
Mumford called white elephants, or grandiose monuments, and the boule-
vards oriented around them, proliferated.
With the political crises of the 20th century uprooting and problematising
the signications of traditional monumentality, particularly in terms of a g-
urative monumental tradition (think of the benecent national symbols of
white women and the correlative form of the white male soldier), the me-
morial form underwent a radical reformation. World War II saw the advent of
an anti-monumental tradition, the so-called living memorial tradition, which
decried the decadence of monumentality and its semblance to a fascistic
aestheticisation and sanctication of politics.
17
It responded with useful me-
morials, often gymnasia or roadways, whose utility was privileged over their
symbolic function. It seems, however, that a dialectical convergence of
monumentality and anti-monumentality would be necessary; for if the
white elephants no longer sufced, nor did the diffuse and functional
living memorial seem to accomplish the proper production of memorial space.
A countermemorial is simply that kind of memorial that explicitly
acknowledges antimonumentalism. As a historically existing group of memor-
ials, they have been built primarily in the North Atlantic beginning in the last
quarter of the 20th century. They have frequently been called upon to
respond to the Holocaust, and Peter Eisenmanns Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe is a frequently cited example, but in the USA,
they were inaugurated by Maya Lins Vietnam War Veterans Memorial.
Countermemorials have clearly pursued a strategy of formalised absence as a
means of satisfying imperatives to memorialise and to do so without reprodu-
cing hegemonic and fascistic monumentality. A further concern relates to the
putative ungurabilty of memorialised events themselves. Deconstructivism
provided resources to solve all of these problems elegantly.
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Together then, there are three primary reasons why September 11th and
the class of events which have been countermemorialised are considered
ungureable (again, whether it is responsible to speak of a class of events or
only of the singular event of the Holocaust is a question; here I will focus on
the conceptual outlines of the putatively ungureable and leave aside the
matter of its extension). First, these events are dened as traumatic and the
traumatic is simply that which cannot nd a place in symbolic representation;
second, the identities of the victims as well as the memories of those who
make claims on the dead are fundamentally plural, incompatible, and irredu-
cible; third, there is the general sense of the barbarism of poetry after
Auschwitz. This is to say that these ungureable events question the possi-
bility as well as the ethical status of representation. We might put the
countermemorial problematic like this: How does one accurately render an
event that intrinsically cannot be rendered, to satisfy a heterogeneous public
whose memories of the event conict with each other, when you suspect that
representation itself is unethical?
A primary solution to the problem has been the formalised absence given by
deconstructivism. Severe minimalism unyokes the memorial from any specic
meaning whose particularity could be exclusive. Multiple heterogeneous
claims can (miraculously) occupy the same space at the same time.
Furthermore, in the case of Reecting Absence, this formalised absence, the
voids, suggest the impossibility of any determination of meaningthere is
suggested here only trauma and repetition, the ow of water into the void
unceasingly resisting the closure of mourning or the redemption of the dead.
We are given, in an apt metaphor, black holes of signicationthose centres
of dense, over-determined meaning where meaning itself collapses in on itself.
Simply put, we address the representation-itself (traumatic and ethical) issues
because nothing is gured. And, a fortiori, we address the pluralism and identity
concerns because no one is privileged.
In terms of a conceptual basis, these countermemorials systematically
problematise the discourses of memory, history, and identity. The term,
countermemorial itself derives from Michel Foucaults counter-memory
or that memory that is inconvenient or problematic for hegemonic history.
Inasmuch as these histories (and already, the plural suggests how the produc-
tion of history also requires the deproduction of counter-histories) are tied to
stable identities ordered within a productive episteme, they are collusive with
and constitutive of a given conguration of Power-Knowledge. As such, a
countermemorial, in refusing to monumentalise a gure of the nation, may
avoid sanctifying hegemonic memories, histories, and identities. It does not, at
least intentionally or explicitly, elect to endorse any dominant history.
The design strategies used to accomplish this vary, but often entail the
deproduction of a hegemonic monumentality. To marry our conceptual
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and historical terms, a Derridean arche-monument corresponds to
Mumfords white elephant; it is the hegemonic form to be deconstructed
and countered. We can then read the systematic inversions: space that is
negative/feminine rather than positive/phallic, melancholic instead of pro-
gressive (incisions in space that do not seem to heal), dynamic/interactive
(think of water elements and reective surfaces) rather that static, dialogical
rather than monological.
Maya Lins design for the Vietnam War Memorial provides a helpful illus-
tration (keep in mind that it is situated on the Mall, putting it, as a black,
granite-lined incision, in conversation with the Washington Monument, a
white obelisk). Lin demonstrated that an abstract, geometric, non-gurative
style could accommodate a plurality of memories without falling into the
ethical and political quagmire of the representative gure. Inasmuch as
the body is a site overwritten with cultural codes, the abstract form of
the countermemorial rejects the gurative body, and a fortiori, circumvents
the problem of any particularism in that coding. Inasmuch as the memorial has
traditionally imposed or encoded a particular history and an institutionalised
memory, the abstraction of her design again circumvents the problem of
particularity through strategic under-determination. This was important
because the Vietnam War itself occupied such a fraught position in
American history.
Though the strategy was perhaps obvious from the inception of the
Vietnam War Veterans Memorial, Lin would come to be more explicit
about its function. In the aftermath of Lins selection, critics decried the me-
morials minimalist form as inhuman, with one critic, Charles Hart, calling it
a black gash in the pages of the New York Times, and insisting on the necessity
for a gurative, traditional monument. After a period of negotiation, a g-
urative statue, Three Fighting Soldiers, was placed near Lins design, representing
three men, who appear to be African American, Latino, and white. Ten years
after this, following a campaign led by Diane Carlson Evans, a gurative statue
of female nurses was added, thus emending the masculinist bias of Three
Fighting Soldiers, which had done its best to address the issue of race. In her
Congressional testimony about the addition of this feminist monument, Lin
objected to the individual concessions and said I am as opposed to this new
addition as I was the last . . . I cannot see where it will all end.
18
The purpose,
again, of her minimalist design was, in part, to circumvent the problems of
specic representations though non-gurative abstraction. As she explained,
What people see or dont see is their own projection.
19
The use of a cipher-like minimalism is repeated in Reecting Absence. This is
more than just an incidental architectural citation. Lin was on the art jury
that selected Arad, as was James Young, a leading theorist of Lins work and
countermonumentality. Young commented about Arads design, None of us
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were looking for a literal reference to the attack. We werent interested in
planes crashing into towers or ames. We were more disposed to an abstract,
under-determined design.
20
In its assiduous commitment to the avoidance of closure, deconstructivism
provides a negative modality through which the problems of trauma, plural-
ism, and adequate representation can be rendered explicit. It is by no means
self-evident that deconstructivism should have emerged as the dominant form
of countermemorials, and yet we recognise how a convergence of philosoph-
ical and political interests could make this intersection seem appropriate. In
part, this also reects the prominence of a generation of post-World War II
Continental thinkers invested in these historical and aesthetic questions and
the permeation of architectural theory by these philosophical developments.
What remains to be seen is what the legacy of these thinkers ought to be. The
truly disconcerting problem is that new aesthetic and cultural formations,
including Libeskinds master plan, have adopted the critical pose of this gen-
eration of thinkers. As such, it is uncertain whether these unintended offspring
undercut the value of their critical forebearers.
I I I . CONTEMPLATI NG THE VOI DS
I suggest nally that a turn to the forebearers of these forebearers, Hegel and
Marx, might provide some critical resources to approach our complex prob-
lem. As maximalist philosophers, they sought to theorise the intersections of
art, religion, politics, and history. This maximalism may seem outmoded, yet
the complexity of objects like Reecting Absence requires a critical apparatus of
this scale. With this is mind, I suggest we turn to these thinkers for help
thinking through these issues.
In Hegels Aesthetics, architecture is a preliminary form of spirits self-
expression. As the sensible concretisation of what spirit only implicitly had
been, the determinacy of art affords spirit a limited but crucial way of appre-
hending itself: it is a necessary propaedeutic on the way to greater forms
of self-reection. Ultimately, within modern development as Hegel sees it,
religion and philosophy provide more complete means for such reection,
yet the three realmsart, religion, and philosophydiffer, as Hegel says,
only in the forms in which they bring home to consciousness their object,
the Absolute.
21
The rst moment in Hegels presentation of the architectural form of art
is the national monumental. Describing this he writes:
For content, we demanded purely universal views in which individuals and
nations have an inner support, a unifying point of their consciousness.
Consequently the primary purpose behind such explicit independent buildings
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is only the erection of something which is a unifying point for a nation or nations,
a place where they assemble. Yet along with this is the subordinate aim of making
obvious, by the mode of conguration, what does in general unify men: the
religious ideas of peoples. These then provide at the same time a more specic
content for such works to express symbolically.
22
We are reminded again of the original call for a powerful statement of uni-
versal symbolism for this space made sacred through tragedy. Perhaps the
memorial is a concretisation of the religious ideas of a people and a unifying
point of national consciousness, about which individuals, a nation, and nations
may gather. The memorial functions both as a general unifying point and as a
particular kind of unifying point, one in which the incompatible presences of
the sacred are mutually excluded and pluralistically respected. And it is as the
recognition of and respect for this incompatibility that the memorial acquires its
more specic content. Indeed, we might suggest that what is given as content
here is the open space of the secular itself. We are given not a naked public
square but one in which pluralist and secular imperatives nd expression as the
abeyance in which we hold our own beliefs out of respect for others.
Perhaps the mode of conguration is deconstructivist. This is to say
that perhaps the memorial folds the limits of the aesthetic as a mode of self-
expression back into the expressive form itself (thus surpassing Hegels end
of art, while paradoxically succumbing to it at the same time). Under these
terms, we might say that the form under which the sacred is made to appear
is as negativity and absence, not as a simple negation, but as the internal
negation of a more complex structure. This memorial interrogates the idea
of the memorial while persisting as the expression of a more complex
conception of what a memorial can be.
At its best we might imagine how these strategies reveal a more ethical social
construction of the sacred. In the rst order, the negativity of this sacred would
disallow a particular coding of the sacred (be it white, masculinist, Christian) to
the exclusion of others. We may see how the mutually recognitive constitu-
encies of American democracy have reforged the sacred (which is not to say
that the sacred is or is not more or less than these reforgings) resolving its
immanent contradictions while preserving it and expressing it in concrete form.
The negativity of the memorial, in my opinion, succeeds in producing a
contemplative atmosphere in which the triumphalism we have come to
expect from state monumentality is absent. In visiting the site, I was struck
by how the enveloping sounds of the falls created a shared intimacy in which
nation, city, and person were thrown into question. Hegel writes:
What is holy? Goethe asks once in a distich, and answers: what links many
souls together. In this sense we may say that the holy with the aim of
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this concord, and as this concord, has been the rst content of independent
architecture.
23
Perhaps then, the content of the memorial is exactly this concord, this bring-
ing together of souls in a manner that is as open and inclusive as possible.
This was perhaps what the jurists intended, having opened their announce-
ment of Arads selection with language reminiscent of Hegels individual,
nation, or nations:
Let us begin by acknowledging that memory belongs primarily to the individual:
the unique and personal remembrance of someone deeply loved, of shared lives,
of unspeakable grief and longing. At the same time, we must acknowledge the
extent to which the evolving process of memory also belongs to families and
neighborhoods, communities and cities, even entire nations.
24
And yet, we turn to the question of Capital, and world trade. It is possible,
again, to see in all of this a kind of farcical misdirection. We could afrm that
the circuits of global exchange have produced the terroristic response directed
at the World Trade Center. As such, a memorial costing more than half a
billion dollars that will serve to provide the bucolic, melancholic veneer for a
ring of ofce towers now rentable for $60 per square foot per year, may appear
as the ultimate ideological fantasy. The negativity of Arads geometric min-
imalism could be read as recapitulating the clean lines of early 20th-century
Fordism and Machine Age modernism. There the identitary codes of all, or,
architecturally, the disposable excess of cultural ornament, were shorn in the
production of empty, reproducible, time-space and its deracinated work force.
It was David Harvey who noted that pluralisms xation on identity politics
was bought through the slow elimination of a class-based politics. He also
noted that the symbolic, cultural, aesthetic, and architectural as elds of mut-
able signs (and the elds in which postmodernism emerged) were far easier to
manipulate than more entrenched productive forces. The logic of late capit-
alism accommodates differences strategically, such that a gradual, protable
incorporation of alterity is predicated on the unquestioned rise of global -
nance capital, neoliberal governance, and their domestic and international
institutions.
25
In the materials accompanying the design competition announcement,
Kevin Rampe, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Interim
President, included a letter in which he asked those submitting designs
to the memorial competition to conceive of a living symbol of mans dedi-
cation to world peace through world commerce.
26
The rst half of that
phrase, the living symbol was borrowed from the dedication of the original
towers. He added the phrase world commerce.
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We must ask then about another absence, one whose reection is not seen
at the memorial: this is the absence of those excluded from the hegemonic
organisation of world commerce. This is to say that as 11th September nds
its way from traumatic event into cultural memory, and, therefore, into a
cultural and symbolic universe, we must ask how this memory, and this
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avowed counter-memory, may be the positive expression of particular inter-
ests; how this nihil negativum is in fact a nihil privativum. My concern is that
organisations of world commerce may have functioned as a cause of the very
attacks we seek to memorialise. As such, the trope of absence may actually
prevent us from recognising specic, legible causes for the attacks. Again, the
transcendent status of the dead, gured in their ungurability, removes them
from the phenomenal world of real politics and real action. What if the
transcendental status of the dead is precisely that ction that occludes our
recognition of real interests? What if the transcendental is simply another,
convenient expression of these thoroughly immanent interests?
What is required, then, is a reection of a more banal sort, a reection of
that which is present, even as we recognise the impossibility of achieving a
total reection. We must attend to the recongurations of American power
that emerged in Cold War interventions (primarily American support of the
Afghan Mujahideen) and the practical contradictions of American liberal
ideology and its strategic position within a global capitalist exchange. At
stake is the legacy of secularism, a legacy to be determined only once the
interests that have given rise to it have been identied. What is required is not
an apology for the murders of 11th September, but a self-examination of our
involvement in the circulation of terror.
This is a bleak vision, and one born of a deep, Marxist suspicion. Though I
hope the questions are provocative, I think we would be foolish to dismiss the
memorial too easily. That this pluralist memorial could be built is a victory,
and a hard-earned one. Though we have to ask what the limits of its pluralism
are, we must value this greater inclusivity.
Furthermore, following Hegel, we could afrm that to accuse the memorial
of failing to make certain problems explicit is to fail to understand the intrinsic
limitations of the form. Michael Arad has noted that one challenge of the
memorial is taking into account (echoing an interest of Derridas) the future
anterior, or what 11th September will have been. That is to say that a
memorial always faces a complex temporal problem: its future legibility is con-
tingent upon the continuity of the cultural scheme in which it was conceived;
at the same time, it cannot control the ux of culture. The meaning of the
memorial, therefore, must unfold in time relative to the culture in which it is
embedded; such is the fate of spirits aesthetic objectications.
I will suggest then, as best I can, a way forward. In the jurys announcement
of their selection of Arad, they commented that the force of the memorial
derived from its ability to allow absence to speak for itself. We must
acknowledge that absence never speaks for itself. Rather, we speak for
absence, always with some implicit notion of what is not present, or what
cannot be present. Reecting Absence, I have suggested, undertakes to provide
two answers to the question what is not present?: rst, it responds, no
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particular meaning or community should be present to the exclusion of others;
second, this event that is recognised as sacred exceeds and dees adequate
representationno such representation is present. As I have noted, critics
reply that pluralism is itself conditioned by a regime of productionthis
absence you see is the presence of secular neo-liberalism. But the memorial,
as it endlessly pours itself into itself, avoids any facile closure. It invites us to
question our intuitions about the limits of culpability and grievability. It asks,
perhaps, if it is possible to extend the civil sacred beyond the limits of the
nation. If, as Simone Weil wrote in another context, All sins are attempts
to ll voids, then perhaps our challenge remains to keep the voids empty,
precisely because absence never speaks for itself.
27
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I delivered a version of the article at the 2012 meeting of the ISRLC.
I would like to thank the audience and organisers of the Visual Arts and
Transnationalism panels for their helpful responses. I would also like to
thank the Religion and Critical Thought Colloquium for its help in thinking
through this project. Finally, I am grateful to Andrew Hass for his insightful
comments.
REFERENCES
1
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine
Art Vol. II, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 637.
2
A. Schopenhauer, in W. Schirmacher
(ed.), The Essential Schopenhauer (New
York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 319.
Kant offers a different account of nihil
negativum and nihil privativum in the
Critique of Pure Reason (the section is
titled, appropriately enough, Amphiboly
of the Conceptions of Reection). Kant
presents a table of nothingness; his nihil
privativum corresponds to Schopenhauers,
but his nihil negativum refers to that
which cannot be conceived because it
contains a contradiction, like a two-
sided gure.
3
Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation, World Trade Center Site
Memorial Competition Guidelines.
<http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/
about_guidelines.html>
4
Memorial Mission Statement and
Memorial Program Committees,
Memorial Mission Statement and
Memorial Program, published by the
Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation. <http://www.renewnyc.
com/Memorial/memmission.asp>
5
As a background: The master plan com-
petition, which Daniel Libeskind ultim-
ately won, began in 2002. This master
plan established parameters for the me-
morial, which had its own design com-
petition in 2003. The administration
of these competitions has fallen to
The Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation. The LMDC is the New
York State and New York City govern-
ment organisation charged with oversee-
ing the redevelopment of the site. The
World Trade Center (WTC) site is
owned by the Port Authority, which is
an interstate agency formed by New
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York and New Jersey. In 2001, before
the attacks, Sheldon Silverstein won the
contract to lease and manage the WTC.
Together these are the primary state and
private actors guiding the rebuilding.
6
D. Sontag, The Hole in the Citys
Heart. The New York Times Online.
(Originally published 11 September
2006.)
7
One problem is that the sacred is gener-
ally taken, by those who lay claim to it,
to have an existence prior to the claim
made to it. Furthermore, this prior exist-
ence does substantial work in justifying
the nature and extent of the claims to
how it ought to be formalised and recog-
nised. Yet, even if some claimants to the
sacred might disagree with constructivists
about the metaphysical status of the
sacred, we ought not overstate the
extent of the problem: there is no need
to think that this disagreement under-
mines broad-based attempts at determin-
ing the form the sacred should take. I
argue that it is misguided and historically
inaccurate to think that the sacred cannot
be contested and reformed despite a dis-
agreement about its metaphysical status or
(what are taken to be) its essential
indicators.
8
S. Nessen, Q&A: Interview with World
Trade Center Site Architect Daniel
Libeskind, WNYC News (website).
9
Ibid.
10
D. Libeskind, Memory Foundations
lecture presented as part of the 9/11
Plus 10, New York City in the
Aftermath of September 11
th
, conference.
CUNY Graduate Center, New York,
NY (19 September 2011).
11
This reading of the museum derives from
theories of representation of the
Holocaust that have been circulating for
some time. The most famous statement
of this problem is probably Adornos
comment about the barbarism of poetry
after Auschwitz. James Young and
Andreas Huyssen are the most well-
known theorists of the relationship
between architecture responding to, and
in light of, the Holocaust. See James
Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
Memorials and Meaning, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993) as well as
Youngs The Art of Memory: Holocaust
Memorials in History (New York: Prestel,
1994).
12
Libeskind has rejected the label
deconstructivist, [see S. Meiser, Daniel
Libeskind: Architect at Ground Zero,
Smithsonian (March 2003)] perhaps aware
of the perils of being identied with a
fad. Despite this, his work, dependent as
it is on the tropes of un/coding, present-
absence, and voids exhibits deconstructi-
vism as much as any other architect on
whom the title has been foisted. Consider
his description of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin as an attempt at the incorporation
of the void of Berlin back into itself, in
order to disclose how the past continues
to affect the present and reveal how a
hopeful horizon can be opened through
the aporias of time [quoted B. Schneider,
Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin:
between the lines (New York: Prestel,
1999), p. 19].
13
Derridas deconstruction can be made to
sound quite architectural, in fact, though
we should be careful not to overstate the
connection. Derrida does employ a
number of architecture metaphors, in
particular, architectonicity. Psyche:
Inventions of the Other Vol. I and II
includes some of his work with Peter
Eisenmann, and gives some of Derridas
views on architecture, as it is commonly
understood.
14
J. Derrida, in P. Kamuf and E.
Rottenberg (ed.), Psyche: Invention of the
Other Vol. I. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007), p. 15.
15
A. Huyssen, Monumental Seduction,
New German Critique 69 (1996) 191.
16
I am indebted to Jeffrey Meyers Myths in
Stone for this account. Myths in Stone:
Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C.
470 DAVID LE

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(Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001).
17
I am indebted to Andrew Shanken for
this account. See: Planning Memory:
Living Memorials in the USA during
World War II, The Art Bulletin 84
(2002) 13047.
18
Quoted in D.C. Evans, Moving a
Vision: the Vietnam Womens Memorial.
[Vietnam Womens Memorial Foundation
promotional literature. The Vietnam
Womens Memorial Foundation, Inc.
www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/
dcevans.pdf
19
R. Wagner-Pacici and B. Schwartz,
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial:
Commemorating a Difcult Past, The
American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991) 393.
20
In a perhaps tting coda, Arad was on
the jury that selected Studio a+is
Innite Forest, an AIDS memorial in
New York. The language of the submis-
sion may sound familiar: An innite
forest, generated by having 3 facing
mirror walls along each side of the
triangular block, denes the park and
the memorial. There are no separate sta-
tues, sculptures or plaques. The memorial
lives within the innite reection of the
white birch trees. We hope this park will
be all things to all people: the children
playing in the bounds of the mirrored
forest, the weary commuter seeking a
respite in the midst of the city and
those visitors coming in memory of
their loss. http://aidsmemorialpark.org/
competition
21
Hegel, Aesthetics Vol. I, p. 101.
22
Hegel, Aesthetics Vol. II, p. 637.
23
Ibid., p. 639.
24
Jury Statement. Paula Grant Berry et al.
wtcmemorial.org. LMDC. http://www.
wtcsitememorial.org/about_jury_txt.html
25
I can only gesture here to the Marxian
theorists of space whose work seems so
vital in addressing the WTC redevelop-
ment. Frederic Jamesons Postmodernism,
Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
and David Harveys The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins
of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA:
B. Blackwell, 1990) remain cornerstones
of the approach. David Gartmans From
Autos to Architecture: Fordism and
Architectural Aesthetics in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2009) emerges from
this tradition and deals directly with
One WTC. Gartman theorises how neo-
liberalism, global nance capital, and
global megacities found in deconstructi-
vism a more amenable design philosophy
than postmodernism, in that it was no
longer tied to the local and culturally
specic codes of the postmodern. One
early attempt at a rapprochement be-
tween Marxist theories of space and reli-
gious studies is Mark C. Taylors
Disguring: Art, Architecture, Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992).
26
K. Rampe, Letter From LMDC
President, World Trade Center Site
Memorial Competition Guidelines.
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/about_
guidelines.html
27
S. Weil, Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans.
A. Wills (New York: Routledge, 2004),
p. 49.
471 NEGATIVITY AND SACRED AT GROUND ZERO

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