Ground Zero: The Domestication of Remains or the Power of Disposal

To articulate the past historically… means to seize hold of a memory [the image of redemption] as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
- Walter Benjamin

The study of reconstruction at Ground Zero has already shown that the reality of remains, debris, and other ruins had to be excluded in order to produce the site of catastrophe as a place where ­construction is ­possible in conformity with the American myth of the new ­beginnings.¹ 1 - See “Ground Zero, Where Do We Go From Here?,” eds. Bertrand Gervais and Christina Horvarth, Écrire la ville, Université du Québec à Montréal, Centre Figura de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire (Figura collection), no. 14, 2005, 183-196; “Ground Zero—Quand l’architecture, comme la guerre, devient préventive,” Le Devoir, September 11, 2003, A7. What remains at issue now is the treatment of those scraps and ­remnants: whether material vestiges that still bear witness to 9/11 at the World Trade Centre site (such as the sunken imprint revealed by the collapse of the towers, and the bathtub or the slurry wall, the ­foundations that contain the Hudson River), or those remains that we choose to discard or to rediscover, to preserve (in a museological sense) or to bury, and their vertiginous proliferation in the forms, languages, and technologies of a contemporary culture exposed to danger.