739 Time Zero: Hiroshima, September 11 and Apocalyptic Revelations in Historical Consciousness Antoine Bousquet This article considers the place of the Hiroshima bombing and the September 11 attacks as singular acts of violence constituting major points of ru p t u re in the historical consciousness and chronological narratives of the Western world: Ground Zero is Time Zero. Geographically and temporally delineated instances of intense death and destruction, both acts have been construed as moments when the world ‘changed for ever’. Our schemata of interpretation – the mental frameworks through which we impose meaning and continuity on the world around us and determine the range of our expectations – were violently overthrown by those events, shattered by images that exceed our minds’ capabilities of representation and symbols that challenge our liberal metanarratives of ineluctable pro g ress. By bringing to the fore their aesthetic dimension and reading them through the lens of the Kantian notion of the sublime, we can grasp those events in their original intensity as overwhelming revelatory experiences. Apocalyptic both in their imagery and the meaning attributed to them, those unprecedented acts of terror represent turning-points in our reconstituted historical narratives, marking a culmination of history leading to it as well as the start of a new era in which it is proclaimed that many previous assumptions no longer hold. –––––––––––––––––––––––– The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell … [It] did not dissolve their bodies, But it dissolved something vitally important to the greatest of them, and the least. What it dissolved were their links with the past and with the future. It made the earth, that seemed so solid, Main Street, that seemed so well-paved, a kind of vast jelly, quivering and dividing underfoot. Herman Hagedorn, ‘The Bomb That Fell on America’ 1 ____________________ 1. Herman Hagedorn, The Bomb That Fell on America (Santa Barbara, CA: Pacific Coast Publishing, 1946). © Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2006. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.34 No.3, pp. 739-764