World Trauma Center

Linda S. Kauffman
American Literary History, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 647-659 (Review)
Published by Oxford University Press

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World Trauma Center

Linda S. Kauffman

1. Trauma and Media For a brief moment following September 11, a space for critical dialogue seemed to open up. Americans wanted to understand Islam, the Middle East, and the history of American involvement in the region. Joan Didion was on a book tour in those weeks, meeting people all over the country who were making connections I had not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between that political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take and was in fact already taking (Didion 5). Her audiences everywhere were skeptical of the ofcial reaction in Washington, D.C., which was to infantilize its citizens (Didion 14). Meantime, while writers were still struggling to formulate their thoughts, the White House rapidly pressed the case for war. The short stretch of national dialogue Didion describes was quickly followed by a long period of silencing and censorship. As Edward Said pointed out the week following 9/11: What is most depressing . . . is how little time is spent trying to understand Americas role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality . . . that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average Americans mind. Youd think that America was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conict, all over the Islamic domains. . . . [It is] an imperial power injured at home for the rst time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has
Linda S. Kauffman has published numerous articles on contemporary ction, lm, and art. She is the author of Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (1998); Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (l986); and Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992). She is editor of three volumes, including American Feminist Thought at Centurys End (1993). She teaches in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.
doi:10.1093/alh/ajp015 Advance Access publication April 10, 2009 # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Falling Man, Don DeLillo. Scribner, 2007. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, E. Ann Kaplan. Rutgers University Press, 2005.

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become a suddenly recongured geography of conict, without clear borders, or visible actors.1 Numerous critics besides Didion and Said objected to the wholesale infantilization of the American people. The prevailing repressive climate compelled Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, editors of Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (2002), to remark that We nd it unacceptably childish that Americans refuse to take any responsibility for September 11. . . because the Americans in question are not children (250). Nevertheless, conservative critics like Roger Rosenblatt announced the death of irony (qtd in Didion 10). William Bennett issued the clarion call for a vast re-learning, by which he meant the reinstatement of a thorough and honest study of our history, undistorted by the lens of political correctness and pseudosophisticated relativism (qtd in Didion 11). The latter two words reveal what Bennett really sees as the source of all our woes: critical theory. In short, 9/11 was seized to stake new ground in the same old, tired, culture wars (Didion 12). This seizure is one of the things Frederic Jameson is reacting against when he argues in The Dialectics of Disaster (2002) that the media-orchestrated display of patriotism was an over-the-top example of the soap opera structure that organizes so much of our personal experience (299). Since that soap opera structure is also known as Oprahization, it is ironic that the memorial service for the families of 9/11 victims, which was held in Yankee Stadium, was led by Oprah Winfrey. The display exposed the schizoid character of America, veering crazily between grief and a pep rally for Team America. Jameson protests that we no longer have any way of feeling our feelings outside of the medias framing of them. His iconoclasm is a useful antidote to the prescribed patriotism following 9/11. It is rash, however, to dismiss the study of trauma in its entirety, as Jameson goes on to do. The idea of inauthenticity, he argues, casts doubt on all those theories of mourning and trauma that were recently so inuential (299). Jameson notwithstanding, much can be gained by investigating what trauma is and how it functions. Such a synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic theory does not detract from analyses of material conditions or ideology; instead, it enhances them. To readers of Althusser, not to mention Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell, and Laura Mulvey,2 this is hardly news, but what is new is how two recent books put such syntheses into practice: David Simpsons 9/ 11: The Culture of Commemoration (2006) and E. Ann Kaplans Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005). Simpson is a specialist in Romanticism and Marxist theory; Kaplan nds feminist and psychoanalytic theory

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indispensable. Both critics historicize 9/11 in useful, complementary ways. For example, Kaplan discusses the origin and evolution of the eld of trauma studies, which began by studying the Holocaust. Like Kaplan, Simpson draws extensively on this eld and on Freud. He is also indebted to Heidegger, as well as to Giorgio Agambens profound philosophical work (Remnants of Auschwitz [1999], Homo Sacer [1998], and State of Exception [2005]). In the latter work, Agamben illustrates how the rule of law is suspended in the name of national security. This suspension is supposed to be temporary, but instead, it has become permanent. Draconian measures that undermine constitutional governments are no longer the exception but the norm in all democratic societies (Agamben 2, 67, 86). Simpson and Kaplan share Jamesons revulsion for the medias framing of the catastrophe. Simpson comments that WTC now seems to stand for World Trauma Center. Kaplan, a professor of media and cinema studies, is as interested in how trauma is managed by institutions, as she is in trauma itself. She criticizes Americas addiction to wounded attachments [and] empty empathy, which are both media-driven (Kaplan 22, 87, 93100). Nevertheless, Kaplan courageously commences on a personal note, albeit without a shred of sentimentality. She lived through the London Blitz, and she explains how being in New York City on 9/ 11 triggered memories of that childhood terror. Kaplan uses herself as a palimpsest to describe the effects of trauma: the shattering of psychic identity, the sense of a pervasive threat in everyday life, and a feeling of lack and humiliation (5, 1213). Signicantly, she depends on theory to help her process these emotions, particularly the work of Freud and Julia Kristevas Black Sun (1989), which reminds us that trauma links the military/political and the personal (Kaplan 45). (Simpson similarly invokes Kristevas Strangers to Ourselves [1991].) Kaplan obsessively photographs the city in the weeks and months after the attack. In retrospect, she realizes that these obsessive attempts to catalog, record, and order her experience were symptoms of the trauma (Kaplan l6)attempts to assimilate the arbitrary randomness of life and death on 9/11. Trauma also disrupts all sense of time. On the one hand, 9/11 was utterly singular; nothing like it had happened on American soil. Yet its dening terms were borrowed from prior catastrophes: Ground Zero, for example, originally referred to Hiroshima, a tragedy, needless to say, of much greater magnitude (Simpson 43). Moreover, despite the governments repeated claims that no one could have imagined such an attack, it had in fact already been anticipatedin numerous Hollywood disaster movies. One had the ` uncanny sensation of deja vu. Numerous theorists (including Baudrillard and Zizek) comment on this sensation.

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Moreover, since cinema and psychoanalysis were born, like conjoined twins, near the end of the nineteenth century, cinema provides a useful lens for examining the workings of memory, displacement, condensation, and melodrama. Kaplan analyzes these elements in Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945), as well as in the work of Marguerite Duras, Sarah Kofman, Maya Deren, and Tracey Moffatt. She enlarges the frame of reference far beyond 9/11 by discussing the struggles of indigenous people in Australia and America; war traumas in Rwanda; and media coverage of Iraq, focusing specically on the March 2003 coverage of the war in Iraq (the month the war commenced). She deconstructs those media images, demonstrating how the media produces empty empathy by portraying suffering victims, without providing the slightest context for them or for the regions politics, global alliances, and history. Like W. J. T. Mitchell, she thus makes a crucial intervention in studies of media and visuality. These superb chapters shed new light on theories of spectatorship. Trauma is twinned with repetitionnot only because it can activate an earlier childhood incident, as in Kaplans case, but because the victim becomes locked in the compulsion to repeat. Narrative theorists, as well as psychoanalytic critics, have long been interested in this phenomenon. To name but three, J. Hillis Millers classic Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982) examines the compulsion to repeat from Bronte to Woolf. John Irwins Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (1996) focuses on psychoanalysis in Faulkners novels. Similarly, in Cloning Terror, a chapter in his book, What Do Pictures Want? (2005), W. J. T. Mitchell talks about the uncanniness of doubling and repetition: two attacks on the World Trade Center, twin towers, the endless replication of images of masked terrorists (Mitchell 5 27). Although they have different academic specialties, Simpson and Kaplan reach the same conclusion: today, we need theory more than ever. We need it specically because it confronts issues that are not merely theoretical: the suffering of oppressed peoples and the tyranny of state power. Whether one thinks of Susan Sontags Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Julia Kristevas Strangers to Ourselves, Judith Butlers Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), or Jacques Derridas late work,3 theory closes the gap between self and the enemy/ other/foreigner (Simpson 159). Simpsons homage to Derrida is particularly powerful, as is his masterful analysis of the merger of victim/executioner or Jew/Muslim in Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz (Simpson 160 70). Kaplan and Simpson both take pains to demonstrate that theory also exposes how America looks

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to the rest of the world. That, indeed, may explain why there are so many targeted efforts to repudiate theory by folks like Roger Rosenblatt, William Bennett, et al. Feminism is one such target, and Kaplan addresses it. The national ideology after 9/11 invented the ction of a united American front, but this proved to be a ction a construction of a consensus in a Eurocentric and largely masculine form (Kaplan 13). She links the social and the psychic when discussing the ethics of witnessing. Furthermore, she analyzes how indigenous lmmakers portray their historical strugglesdomestic as well as political. The documentaries are by Australian Essie Coffey, My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978), and Alanis Obomsawin, a First Nations director who portrays the destruction of both civil rights and Native American sacred rites. Kaplans discussion of Maya Derens lms and the postcolonial practices in Tracey Moffatts lm also emphasize the crucial role of gender. In so doing, Kaplan makes an enormous contribution to the discourses of 9/11 by enlarging our world view of gender oppression. It is remarkable how few books on 9/11 consider the ramications of what Zillah Eisenstein calls global misogyny. As Eisenstein succinctly puts in, The male military mentality operates on both sides of the ill-named East/West divide. . . . [P]ost-September 11 has also become a very manly moment (84, 86). This phenomenon has become even more pronounced since Eisensteins essay was published in Social Text; Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, handily won the California gubernatorial election by ridiculing opponents whom he labeled girly men. Just as Kaplan accentuates the plight of indigenous women and the atrocities in Rwanda, Eisenstein recalls the rape camps in Bosnia and the sexual slavery of women by the Japanese military during World War II. Afghan women began making enormous gains in terms of liberty and literacy in the 1970s, Eisenstein argues, until the CIA overthrew the secular, leftist government: Bushs bombs should not now be cloaked and legitimized by a defense of womens rights. . . . First [womens] successes are smashed by U.S. policy, and then they are used in their smashed existence to justify yet another war on their behalf (83 84). The US has been complicit in destabilizing other regions besides Afghanistan: Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Like Eisenstein, Kaplan, and Simpson criticize Americans willful amnesia about these activities. Simpson condemns the repression of theory [as] one mark of willed ignorance maintained by the major media (7). Eisenstein, Simpson, and Jameson all remind us of the US governments long history of crushing leftist organizations at home and abroad. As with feminist theory, Marxist

Kaplan makes an enormous contribution to the discourses of 9/11 by enlarging our world view of gender oppression. It is remarkable how few books on 9/11 consider the ramications of what Zillah Eisenstein calls global misogyny.

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theory is another target for neoconservatives and the mainstream media, who repudiate the efforts of those who work on behalf of the oppressed. This explains why Simpson is adamant about cataloging the systematic efforts to silence theorists: For theory, one can. . . often read Marx (142).

2. Don DeLillos Falling Man Don DeLillo has been writing 9/11 novels for thirty years, charting the movement of two antagonistic forces: capitalism and terrorism (Binelli 1). In his recent novel, Falling Man, trauma makes time stand still; one arrested moment stands in metonymically for the whole horror. The title alludes to Richard Drews famous newspaper photograph of the man falling from the north tower, head rst. The photo juxtaposes the World Trade Centers vertical massiveness with the puniness of the gure plunging to his death. DeLillos title becomes a symbol of the post-9/11 human condition. Filled with dread of an impending doom that has been momentarily arrested, we are all suspended in a perpetual state of abeyance (Falling 4). If J. Hillis Miller, John Irwin, and W. J. T. Mitchell are the theory, Falling Man is the practice, for it deploys many of the narrative techniques those critics analyze: doubling, repetition, mirroring, and the uncanny. Moreover, every repetition is different; each unleashes something new, unexpected, unspeakable. Structurally, the novel is a tour de force. DeLillo juxtaposes two narrative lines that move in opposite directions: forward and backward. The story moves forward in time as Hammad, one of the nineteen hijackers, makes preparations for jihad, under the tutelage of Mohammad Atta.4 Keith Neudeckers story, in contrast, moves backward from the moment when he is at work in the World Trade Center when the rst plane (carrying Hammad) strikes the north tower. The novels circular structure compresses the action of the novel into a few minutes between the moment the plane approaches the north tower and the moment Keith stumbles onto the street, miraculously alive. Keith emerges from the tower covered in the blood of his colleagues. In the daylight, he sees a white shirt oat to earth. Only at the end of the novel do we get a sense of the experience he has been replaying compulsively in his head, for the novel concludes minutes earlier than where it began, by describing the scene in the tower at the moment of impactthe noise, heat, smell of jet fuel, darkness, chaos, and carnage. Keith futilely tries to rescue his buddy, Rumsey, whose death throes Keith witnesses. The novels end reprises the beginning, as the white shirt comes

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down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life (Falling 246). DeLillo never specically identies Drews photograph. Nor does he use the words Ground Zero, trauma, or 9/11. Instead he describes their effects in precise detail: the panicstricken, disheveled crowds, covered in ash, eeing through lower Manhattan. Keith is the most traumatized character in the novel; he is disoriented in time, space, and even in his own body: He walked away from it and into it at the same time. . . . That was him coming down, the north tower (Falling 3 4). He is also a walking time bomb, enraged by his own impotence. He cannot connect with anything from the time before (now everything is either before or after 9/11). Mourning and melancholia often evoke contradictory reactions: acting out versus working through trauma. But Keith refuses to discuss (much less work through) the trauma with his (potentially) soon-to-be-ex-wife, Lianne, despite her insistent entreaties. Instead, he briey hooks up with another woman, who was also in the north tower. Together, they rehearse the specic, ghastly moments of that daya need far stronger than sex. He needs to hear her recount it again and again, trying to nd himself in the crowd (Falling 57). He cannot absorb the randomness of having survived: The idea that he was alive was too obscure to take hold (Falling 6). Keiths condition is precarious, because he is manifesting all the symptoms E. Ann Kaplan enumerated: psychic splintering, paranoia, emptiness, and humiliation. Worst still, he wants someone to pay. Martin Ridnour, a German friend, senses this punitive, vengeful streak, which seems to him quintessentially American: to Martin, it seems tting that Keith once owned a pit bull, a dog that was all skull and jaw, an American breed, developed originally to ght and kill (Falling 44). Since life now is nothing but a crap shoot, Keith joins the pros, playing cards in the desert. In Vegas, He wondered if he was becoming a selfoperating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable (Falling 226). DeLillos symbolism initially seems heavy-handed, until one realizes that he is implicitly invoking another group on a desert mission: the troops sent to Baghdad were armed with decks of cards featuring Al Qaedas Most Wanted. Saddam Hussein was the Ace of Spades. This explains why, at one point, Keith savagely laments, Too bad I cant join the army. Too old. . . or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family (Falling 214).5 The American character is schizoid, split between murderous impulses and Norman Rockwell fantasies. Small wonder, then,

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that Keith nds grim solace in rigid self-control and repetitive motion. Robots do not worry about the ethics of killing, survivors guilt, or posttraumatic stress disorder. Ironically, David Simpson makes the same point, drawing our attention to the latest U.S. Defense Department fantasy [which] is wrapped up with robots. The so-called Future Combat System promises to be the biggest military contract in American history. . . [ providing] combat without casualties (Simpson 169). Falling Man resembles Saul Bellows Dangling Man (1944) and J. M. Coetzees 2005 novel Slow Man (Boxall). It is a mosaic of arrested moments, still lifes of paintings, a frieze of memories. When Nina, Liannes mother, dies, Lianne stays in touch with Martin, her mothers lover, because Martin helped her see Nina in a kind of freeze-frame, vivid and alert (Falling 192). Keith, similarly, is haunted by several freeze-frames that he cannot get out of his mind: his buddy Rumsey, dematerializing before Keiths eyes. The ceiling of his ofce, rippling, then collapsing. In addition to temporal and spatial disorientation, words fail Keith: There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unnished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means (Falling 5). Many of the novels most memorable scenes describe New Yorkers striving to return to their normal routines, while adapting to their drastically altered, surreal environment. (E. Ann Kaplan records the same phenomenon.) Some time after the attacks, Keith sees a horseback rider in a yellow hard hat in Central Park. The sight strikes him as Something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash (Falling 103). The word witness is revealing, since the act of working through trauma involves witnessing, testifying, and translating. Lianne, an editor for a university press, is working on a book on ancient alphabets, written by a Bulgarian writing in English. But how can one translate experience when meaning has vaporized? The media rushes in to ll the void. Ever the iconoclast, DeLillo highlights the medias excesses. In fact, it is precisely the medias packaged sentimentality that makes Keith so resistant to analyzing his trauma. Emotion, sincerity, authenticity have become suspect. Language has been debased. While for Keith, language has ceased to signify, his son, Justin, speaks in monosyllables to learn something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts (Falling 66). It helps me go slow when I think, Justin says

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(Falling 66). The apple has not fallen far from the tree: father and son both need the illusion of control when they feel out of control. Justins parents explain what happened on 9/11, but Justin seems unable to absorb its reality. He dedicates himself to obsessive surveillance, watching the skyline with binoculars, looking for signs of the terrorists. Since his parents did not permit him to see it on television, Justin gathers scraps of misinformation from his playmates who, presumably, were allowed to watch the catastrophe unfold in real time, on TV. The point seems to be that no one can be sheltered from the media, nor can anyone escape it. The version of events Justin concocts is another example of freeze-framing time: 9/11 is imminent, but has not yet happened. [Bin Laden] says this time the towers will fall, Justin announces to his disconcerted parents (Falling 102). These, too, are symptoms of trauma. While Justin and Keith respond to trauma by acting out, Lianne Neudecker tries valiantly to work through the trauma. She exemplies the phenomenon Joan Didion described, of New Yorkers voraciously devouring information about the Middle East. Lianne tries to teach herself about the regions history, geography, people, and Islam. She tries to read the Koran. She read everything they wrote about the attacks (Falling 67). She does not simply want information; she wants to assimilate the catastrophe that has befallen her, her family, city, and the nation. DeLillo repeatedly uses the words absorb and assimilate to describe Liannes desire: She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other peoples pores . . . [because] other people have truer lives (Falling 105). Unfortunately, this includes absorbing the media-fueled paranoia and xenophobia, which were exploited to justify the march towards war. As a result, by 2003, half the country mistakenly believed that one or more of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi (Rich xii xiii). Lianne is not immune from this hysteria; instead, she is incensed by music blaring from a neighbors apartment, which to her sounds Turkish, or Egyptian, or Kurdish: Theyre the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasnt true (Falling 68). Rationally, she knows she should not blame whole populations for the actions of a few madmen. (Turks and Kurds had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, and Atta was the only Egyptian.) Liannes actions are consistently inconsistent: at times, she is angry with all foreigners, yet she nds herself near Union Square on 29 August 2004, at a peace march with ve hundred thousand others. One is supposed to work through trauma rather than acting out, but neither reaction results in anything like closure. In DeLillo, as in Faulkner, less oft is peace.6

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3. Memory and Memorials If death alone brings peace, the act of commemoration remains a highly contested and contentious one, fraught with competing ideological signications. David Simpson illustrates how the contradictions of our times can be seen in our commemorative sites. He discusses the long march of history, during which the war dead were buried in mass graves, without commemoration. It was not the custom to honor the ordinary citizen. Although the casualties in World War I were so staggering that it was impossible to memorialize each individual, mass memorials sprang up even in small villages. During the Great War, he notes, the lists of the unrecovered dead reached massive gures. In the summer of 1916 some 72,000 German casualties were accounted for, while 86,000 were missing or mutilated beyond recognition (Simpson 33). Regarding 9/11 and its aftermath, E. Ann Kaplan devotes considerable attention to both the print and television media coverage of the war, with particular attention to CNN and the New York Times. Similarly, Simpson discusses the New York Times Portraits of Grief in detail. He reminds us that they were initially framed as portraits of the missing. Once it became apparent that there would be few survivors and fewer remains, the portraits functioned as unofcial obituaries (Simpson 24). In an effort to resist the Oprahization of experience, Simpson uninchingly exposes the ideological function of this series, which was nationally syndicated and eventually published as a book: The Portraits of Grief seem regimented, even militarized, made to march to the beat of a single drum. . . . [They] were invented . . . as a legitimation of the American way of life. . . . Portraits has entered popular culture as a patriotic icon (Simpson 23, 39 40, 43). In this and many other respects, Simpsons book is a bracing antidote to sentimentality. Why, he wonders, is there no similar commemoration for the soldiers and civilians in the Iraq War? Why is the American public not even permitted to see images of the soldiers cofns? The Portraits, like so many other ofcial documents, turned mass murder into a sign of national destiny. This, he argues, is always the function of spectacle: to insist on destiny, providence, and to stage events for us (Simpson 32 5). Simpson and Kaplan both investigate the function and meaning of memorials. To speak of theory in the time of death means recognizing its usefulness in confronting what might otherwise render us mute, paralyzed (Simpson 156). The need to bear witness and to translate trauma are two functions of a memorial. Other functions are pedagogic, archival, and sacramental. Signicantly, both theorists devote chapters to the contested space

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at Ground Zero. Since the victims families felt that the hallowed space was essentially a crematorium, city planners, architects, and civic leaders faced enormous difculties in choosing the building and landscape design. Simpson and Kaplan both stress that the conict goes to the very root of the question of how history will be represented. They both hoped that the design would reect a new cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, instead of creating a truly global memorial, architect Daniel Libeskinds compromise (and compromised) Freedom Tower glories American triumphalism. That is a great pity, because in the best of all possible worlds, the site might have served as an afrmation of global solidarity, one that enabled us to see ourselves in the Other, to unite our suffering with others who mourn. It might have been a testament to humanity, rather than to American power, invincibility, and exceptionalism. We might have engaged in a dialogue of ideas with the Islamic world, rather than turning 9/11 into a Manichean struggle between good and evil. The clash of civilizations need not have become a self-fullling prophecy. Instead, we have witnessed the vast remilitarization of the world and the suspension of the rule of law at home and abroad. That is Saids lament, as well as Jamesons, Didions, Eisensteins, Kaplans, and Simpsons. All these critics confront what DeLillo calls the ruins of the future (DeLillo, Ruins). They all exhort us to situate 9/11 in the context of world traumas. From this perspective, not only individuals, but nations engage in a paranoiac acting out (Zizek 389). From this perspective, 9/11 was a repetition of the terrorism that is routine nearly everywhere else. For example, Chiles 9/11 happened in 1973that was the date of the military coup that overthrew Allende. It is therefore urgent to show how the news and print media achieve their distorted effects. It is equally urgent to expose the gap between democratic principles and undemocratic practices wherever they occur, and to focus on transnational conict and resolution. Terrorism should never happen anywherein the Palestinian territories, Rwanda, Sarajevo, Israel, or the Sudan. That is the conclusion of the few people I have assembled here, who all remark on a brief moment in time.7 One can only hope that their efforts to demystify our recent past will not be in vain. As Simpson poignantly puts it, There is a lot to be worked through (20).

Notes
1. Long before 9/11, Said was considered subversive by the FBI, which had an extensive le on him, obtained by David Price under the Freedom of Information Act. Price cites Hoover Institute anthropologist Stanley Kurtzs testimony before

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the House Subcommittee on Select Education. Kurtz blamed Saids post-colonial critique for inuencing Middle Eastern scholars to such an extent that they could or would not contribute to Bushs war on terror. See http:counterpunch.org/ pricesaid.html. 13 January 2006. Accessed on 18 June 2008. 2. These three socialist feminists were leaders in insisting on the political usefulness of psychoanalysis. As Rose points out, psychoanalysis is already political for feminism; moreover, she argues, until the early 1980s, there had been a fairly consistent repudiation of Freud within the British Left. . . [which was] part of a larger question about the importance of subjectivity to our understanding of political and social life (83 84). 3. See Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (U of Chicago P, 1996); Politics of Friendship (Stanford UP, 1997); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford UP, 1999); Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmontelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford UP, 2000); Acts of Religion (Routledge, 2002); Without Alibi (Stanford UP, 2004); and Two Essays on Reason (Stanford UP, 2005). 4. In The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillos In the Ruins of the Future, Baader-Meinhof, and Falling Man, Modern Fiction Studies 54:2 (Summer 2008): 353 77, I discuss the relationship between these two terrorists, and the links between DeLillos essay, short story, and novel. Baader-Meinhof deals with both the l970s German radicals, and Gerhard Richters paintings of them. 5. For the insight about this quotation and the decks of cards featuring the Most Wanted Al Qaeda members, I am indebted to Marie-Christine Leps, Falling Man: Performing Fiction, International Conf. on Don DeLillo and the Ethics of Fiction, Univ. of Osnabruck, Osnabruck, Germany, 25 27 April 2008. 6. The phrase from Shelleys The Recollection was a favorite of Faulkners.

7. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 19571972, Exhibition organized by Peter Wollen, Mark Francis, and Paul-Herve Parsy (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1991). DeLillos title character, Falling Man, is a parachutist who stages random jumps all over Manhattan. He (intentionally or unintentionally) reminds outraged spectators of the people who fell or jumped from the towers. As a spontaneous intervention, unorchestrated by the media, his art invokes the spirit of the Situationists.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Binelli, Mark. Intensity of a Plot: An Interview with Don DeLillo. Guernica Magazine July 2007. 18 June 2007 ,http:// www.guernicamag.com/interviews/ 373/instensity_of_a_plot/.. Boxall, Peter. Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man. International Conf. on Don DeLillo and the Ethics of Fiction. U of Osnabruck,

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Osnabruck, Germany, 25 27 April 2008. DeLillo, Don. In the Ruins of the Future: Reections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September. Harpers Dec. 2001: 3340. . Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007. Didion, Joan. Fixed Ideas: America since 9.11. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. Eisenstein, Zillah. Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11. Social Text 72 (Fall 2002): 7999. Hauerwas, Stanley and Frank Lentricchia. Notes from the Editors. Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11. Ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia. Spec. issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:2 (Spring 2002): 249 50. Jameson, Frederic. The Dialectics of Disaster. Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11. Ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia. Spec. issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:2 (Spring 2002): 297 304.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Life and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Rich, Frank. Preface. Fixed Ideas: America since 9/11. By Joan Didion. New York: New York Review of Books, 2003. vii xiv. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986. Said, Edward. Islam and the West are inadequate banners. The Observer 16 Sep. 2001. 13 June 2008 ,http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2001/sep/16/ september11.terrorism3.. Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11. Ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia. Spec. issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (Spring 2002): 3859.