Few can embrace the idea that the social bond exists through a shared sense of loss. This is why the moments when the shared sense of loss becomes visible are often quickly followed by the attempt to assert a positive collective identity. Or, to put it in other terms, when enjoyment becomes visible, we retreat toward pleasure. 159
Attacks of September 11, 2001 … immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in American society. Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling, most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity. …
This is a bond that one suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an attack, this bond was not one formed though the male logic of friend/enemy, which is why the heading in Le Monde on September 12, 2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.”
The bond formed around the September 11 attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become a part of American society at that moment.
The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable. One enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also entails complete humiliation. The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma – the shame of enjoyment itself. 160
In order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness – the recovery of an imaginary perfect security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable, but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints.
Because we seek respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of loss – that is, only according to the female logic of not-having. 160