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9 History’s Remains Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event(s) of 9/11 In early September 2001 Jacques Derrida published in English a collection of essays written over the span of about two decades on the theme of mourning. Though many had been published before, some even in English translation, they had never been gathered together into a single volume before Derrida allowed Pascale-Anne Brault, Kas Saghafi, and myself to publish them under the title The Work of Mourning. The book was thus released in early September but was, as one might expect, quickly forgotten in the wake of what came to called the ‘‘events’’ of September 11th. Yet as the initial shock of those events, along with the pain, anguish, and mourning that immediately followed, began to give way to reflection and to questioning, the book began to attract more and more attention as many began to wonder whether Derrida’s work might not speak in some way about how we should best respond to what had happened in New York City and in Washington, D.C., though also, albeit in a different way, in the rest of the United States and throughout the world. When in early October Derrida did a book signing at Labyrinth Books in New York City, over four hundred people turned out—coming, I think, to hear Derrida speak of mourning and to learn from his writing something about how to mourn but also, no doubt, by coming together and partaking in this commercial ritual actually to participate in the work of mourning in one of the first in what would prove to be a long series of public or collective gatherings of mourning in New York City and elsewhere. Though 167 The Work of Mourning is essentially a book about what we might call private mourning, individual mourning, here Derrida’s mourning of some fourteen close friends and colleagues, there are clues throughout that volume about how to relate these reflections to public mourning, to better and worse ways of remembering the dead through ritual and memorialization , better and worse ways of speaking about, recalling, or understanding death—or, perhaps, the ‘‘event.’’ In this chapter I propose to take up some of these clues from Derrida’s The Work of Mourning in order to ask about collective or communal mourning in America, about how we mourned and remembered, how we should have mourned and remembered, in the wake of the event—or the events—of September 11. How is it that we mourn together—as a family, a community, or a state? Why do we do it, and is it a good thing? Is it really mourning or are all the rituals and ceremonies of public mourning designed to assure us that death has not really taken place and that there is no real need to mourn? But rather than enter the debate or polemic surrounding the proper response to 9/11 at ground zero, whether to rebuild or not, whether to build a monument to celebrate freedom or a memorial to honor the victims , I wish instead to develop these questions of collective or communal mourning by looking at two very different examples, one from each end of the Western tradition, so to speak, the first, the role mourning plays in the constitution of the state in Plato, particularly in his Laws, and then, closer to home, the controversy surrounding another relatively recent attempt in the United States to remember and memorialize, a controversy with its roots in the Vietnam conflict but one whose effects are still with us today, post–9/11 and right up to the current conflict in Iraq. In the spirit of repatriating the very concept of communal mourning, I will focus here on the uniquely twentieth-century ritual of collective mourning known as the dedication or consecration of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, a story of haunting and a story itself haunted, as we shall see, by many of the ethical and philosophical issues that have been pressed upon us in large part by 9/11. Ignoring here all the differences between a memorial erected to soldiers fallen in combat during wartime and one commemorating civilians killed in an attack outside conventional warfare, I will suggest that we can learn a great deal about mourning—and perhaps about how to mourn the event, these events—by looking at this controversy and at the way in which...

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