What's in a Name-Date? Reflections on 9/11

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Notes

I discuss the phrase and notion of a “war on terror” in “War on Terror,” In Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundzic (Eds.), Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 128–158.

For instance: newly heroic (and politically exploitable) connotations for the idiom “let's roll” newly grim or ghoulish ones for “boxcutter” or “Fresh Kills.” I should probably gloss that last example, which I could not resist offering but which falls slightly beyond the circle of generally known facts about 9/11. Fresh Kills Landfill, named for the Fresh Kills estuary on the west shore of Staten Island, was from 1947 to 2001 the major dumping ground for the City of New York. Slated to be closed and transformed into wetlands in the spring of 2001, it was temporarily reopened (September 2001–July 2002) as the forensic site and processing ground for the roughly one million tons of debris removed from the World Trade Center site. A traveling exhibit (now a web page), “Recovery,” has documented the search for human remains and material evidence during this period: see http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibits/longterm/documents/recovery.pdf. (accessed November 2006). Fresh Kills is still in the news at present writing: a lawsuit was filed in 2006 by a group representing families of 9/11 victims seeking proper burial for discoverable human remains in the former landfill.

Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 220. Scholarship on historical trauma has become substantial: for a broad and theoretically sophisticated recent study see Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

At the time of writing.

If there is a single thinker whose name deserves to be associated with the effort and imperative to read or understand a phenomenon of the order of “September 11,” it is arguably Derrida. One reason why he was able to offer such richly textured reflections in his interview with Giovanna Borradori on October 22, 2001, is because he had behind him some four decades of relevant philosophical thinking (in addition to more than three decades of visible activity as a public intellectual speaking out on political and social issues). From his early studies of Husserl to his last texts, he pressured and undermined (though never simply erased) the difference between empirical and conceptual or ideal phenomena, as part of a sustained meditation on the “event” that took many forms, most famously that of a meditation on what Western culture has tagged as “writing.”

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991 [1983]). Anderson borrows the phrase “homogenous empty time” from Walter Benjamin. I analyze Anderson's writings about nationalism in my The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 45–73. Dates, of course, have always been chargeable with political significance (as the old song about Guy Fawkes Night emphasizes: “Remember, remember the fifth of November”); but the name-date per se, as temporal marker and toponym, seems to flourish particularly in revolutionary and republican contexts from the late eighteenth century on (and may have some cultural affinity with a slightly older literary tradition of “poems on the naming of places”: on this tradition, see Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscription, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” The Unremarkable Wordsworth [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 31–46).

According to the Wikipedia entry on 9-1-1, the emergency number was in fact originally introduced as “nine-eleven,” but since it was found that in panic situations people sometimes looked vainly for an “eleven” on their keypad, the phrase was altered to “nine-one-one.” I have not been able to verify that claim but have been able to cross-check the following information: the number 9-1-1 was established in 1968 by ATT in response to a recommendation from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, though only in 1999 was a Congressional bill signed designating it as the official emergency number. The number still does not cover some rural areas of the United States and Canada. For information on the history of 9-1-1, see http://www.nena9-1-1.org, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1. (accessed November 2006).

In Europe the telephone emergency number is 112 (in Britain it is 999), so familiarity with the American 9-1-1 code cannot simply be assumed. The date of September 11 seems to have been chosen, probably by Mohamed Atta, in mid-August, 2001, when the hijackers' airline tickets began to be booked. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks, was notified of the chosen date by coded message about that time.) Atta, who had of course received his pilot training in the United States, may well have had the North American emergency number in mind; but all we learn from the 9/11 Commission Report is that Atta suggested to his co-conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh that “the attacks would not happen until after the first week in September, when Congress reconvened.” See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 248–249.

There are other significant September 11ths in Western history, as David Simpson reminds us—at the same time reminding us that such patterns present us with a sheerly “paranoid coherence”: “the assassination of Allende on September 11, 1973; the British Mandate in Palestine on September 11, 1922; the U.S. invasion of Honduras on September 11, 1919; and the defeat of the Ottoman armies before the gates of Vienna on September 11, 1683.” David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14. One could extend such paranoid reasoning: flipped into European day-month mode, “9/11” becomes November 9, the date both of the night of terror called Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, and of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” In Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88, 94.

Ibid., 93.

Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth.” In Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid., 25.

One is by a professional photographer and one by a police officer: see Joel Meyerowitz, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (New York: Phaidon Press, 2006); and John Botte, Aftermath: Unseen 9/11 Photos by a New York City Cop (New York: Regan Books, 2006). Another recent book focused on photography and 9/11 is David Friend, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (New York: Farrer, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006). The summer of 2006 also saw the appearance of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, illustrated by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

The conspiracy-theory literature on 9/11 is staggeringly profuse. A good place to begin is with the film Loose Change (first version, 2005; revised versions in 2006), written and directed by Dylan Avery; versions of this film are available for free viewing on the Internet, and there are numerous sites supporting or debunking it. Of the many books written from this perspective, one of the most influential has been Thierry Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002). The adaptability of 9/11 to conspiracy theory and by extension to the thriller genre (the brilliantly written 9/11 Commission Report often delivers the page-turning pleasures of a Robert Ludlum novel) deserves further analysis. Elsewhere I have argued that the sovereign and the terrorist become skewed doubles in late-twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Western discourse (see “War on Terror”); and it is possible to understand the appeal of conspiracy theories as in part a recognition of the intimacy between “terrorism” and “state terror.” Paranoia, as many thinkers and writers have observed, shapes the very possibility of modernity's interpretation of itself. For a recent study, see John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

Portions of this tape was broadcast by Al Jazeera on September 7, 2006.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 46. I have argued for a connection between nationalism and melancholia along slightly different lines in The Politics of Aesthetics.

This essay is extracted from a longer essay, “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11.” An early version of portions of that longer text formed the basis of a plenary lecture for the John Douglas Taylor conference, “Beyond Ground Zero,” held at McMaster University on October 21, 2006. I thank the conference organizers, Don Moore and Karen Espiritu, for inviting me, and the conference participants for offering me feedback that helped me refine my argument.