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Coda Everyday Grief I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” Talking with others about this project over the past few years, I have been struck by the persistent repetition of one particular question: whether I planned to include any discussion of the events of September 11, 2001. The query in itself was not what stood out for me; cultural critics, after all, ordinarily feel a certain obligation to analyze such events, an obligation experienced as all the more pressing in periods when, as today, the pursuit of critical thought is depicted not merely as unnecessary luxury but as unpatriotic dissent.1 What did eventually surprise me about the question, however— and I am abashed at how long it took me even to notice—was that no one ever argued for, or even inquired after, my inclusion in this study of any other contemporary grief-marked event: not, say, the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, not the Iraq war, not even (to keep the space of the event within a geographically narrow “American” frame) the catastrophic 2005 flooding of the Gulf Coast. In terms of the politics of grief, 9/11 was evidently the event of our times. I do not think this selectivity means that my interlocutors were simply indifferent to the devastation of those other events. Instead, it suggests something more specific about the conceptual landscape of the present, and about the way 9/11 has come to signify as the gold standard of contemporary affective eventfulness, the way it has become what Jacques Derrida identifies as a fait date, a date marked but also felt, marked as felt.2 The feelings linked with 9/11 are, moreover, universalized : “everyone” is invited to participate in its trauma, everyone is addressed as co-participant, fellow-sufferer, witness, survivor, mourner. One does not need to be “American” to feel the mingled awe and reverent sorrow that 261 emerged as the appropriate affective response to the event—but anyone who responds with a different feeling, who feels, say, indifferent or unsympathetic , is open to the charge of inhumanity. The flooding of the Gulf Coast, in contrast, was followed by an interposition of distance between Katrina’s victims and the witnesses: the witnesses were invited to feel compassion and horror at the events, but not, I think, in a way that marked the date as universally felt. The bulk of the U.S. media coverage, orienting itself toward a generically “national” viewer, was always intensely aware of and shaped around the disproportionate poverty and blackness of Katrina’s victims, limiting the amount of sympathy required via the projection of a Gothicized disorder in place of 9/11’s transcendent trauma.3 At this point in time, then, among the events that I have mentioned (and others that might also have been), 9/11 alone has been singled out to speak of and for the nation-beforethe -world, to retain the charge that bears perpetual witness to a sense of sublime significance, and to be, through the endless citation of its neofoundational status, its unchallenged ushering in of a new era, made sacred. The nationalist invocation of 9/11 works through a condensation of its meaning in a resonantly typical commemorative language: on the “public” side, there is the resolve to defy grief by constructing a massive, monumental tower, 1,776 feet tall, commemorating “Freedom,” footnoted by a contemplative parklike setting that will house the (literally) reflective memorial for the dead; and on the “intimate” side, there remains the desire to sacralize the trauma of the day, maintaining its pain across time in a manner similar to the mediated preservation of the public’s grief over Lincoln, a mode of preservation visible in the insistent recirculation of official images and stories containing that trauma which now distinguishes anniversaries of the date. Markers of one’s participation in the great national mourning can be secured in everything from T-shirts to commemorative license plates insisting , “We Will Never Forget.”4 The permanence of the remembering affirmed in this slogan effectively communicates the sense that 9/11 exists outside ordinary time: as trauma recollected and recirculated, it rapidly claimed what James Der Derian terms a sense of “exceptional ahistoricity,” a sense of being “beyond experience, outside of history and between war.”5 The maintenance of such exceptional times within the story...

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