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Epilogue: The Traitors in Our Midst The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize, that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about. —jacques derrida, “autoimmunity” I am a patriotic, loyal American. I am not a terrorist, nor am I spy. —james yee, for god and country After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the question of betrayal seemed to take on an immediacy and urgency that would have been difficult to imagine when I first began writing An Ethics of Betrayal. And yet, it remains difficult to know what exactly happened on September 11. For every narrative that marks 9/11 as a singular event irreducible to anything in the nation’s—or the world’s—past, there are reminders that the state of emergency it supposedly inaugurated is “more of the same” for both people of color in the United States and for colonial and postcolonial subjects elsewhere. For every suggestion that American citizens would now have to face up to the complex ecologies of international politics, there was boasting assurance (trumpeted first and foremost by the Bush-Cheney administration) that Americans would not have to give up their “way of life.” And for every suggestion that there was no justification for the massive loss of life that took place on September 11, there were the historical recountings, albeit muted in mainstream discourse, that cast the attacks (not to mention the political conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq) as chickens coming home to roost or, perhaps more poetically, the specters of U.S. Cold War and neo-imperialist machinations around the world returning with a fury. But, even if we remain unable to read the “telegram,” as Jacques Derrida calls it, of September 11, in the intervening months and years, the nation has of course gone on. It has survived, and even, we might daresay , reconciled itself to September 11, by churning out its discourse of epilogue / 161 retribution and war. Precisely because the war on terror that September 11 inaugurated marshaled the lexicon of loyalty, betrayal, responsibility , and faith in potent and spectacular forms, the ethical inquiry that I have described in the preceding chapters remains crucial in the political projects of minority discourse. This, even as the ethical subject of that discourse can never apprehend the conditions of September 11 in their totality. The minority subject’s own “taking-place” has been implicated in the occurrence of the event, and induces us to stop being, in Rosalind Morris’s words, “shocked,” and leads us instead to be “disillusioned” with the idealized forms of innocent sovereignty that citizenship promises .1 Through an ethics of betrayal, we might recast the possibilities for responsibility and freedom or agency in ways that seek to do justice to all the “victims” of September 11: those who died in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania; those victims of hate crimes in the U.S. after the attacks ; those detainees suspected of terrorist activities in the U.S.; those Afghani and Iraqi citizens killed in U.S. wars of retribution and “liberation ”; those U.S. troops from minority and working-class or impoverished backgrounds who find themselves in the military because it offered a promise of economic and professional security and mobility unavailable to them in other sectors of the U.S. workforce; those “enemy combatants ,” held in places like Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, subject to illegitimate standards of detention; and those countless others whose very presence cannot be registered within the American imaginary. An ethics of betrayal will necessarily fail these victims of September 11, even as it tries to account for the singularity of each loss. It will fail because the claims of each of these others are absolute and irrefutable . And it will fail because the claim of each other will contradict the claims of every other other. But an ethics of betrayal will also justify neither the political and military rhetoric of U.S. international policy nor that of Islamic fundamentalism. It cannot be satisfied with adequate representation as a model of justice, so neither of these discourses will suffice to understand what is at stake in the world after September 11. In this conclusion to An Ethics...

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