Trauma and Dereification: September 11 and the Problem of Ontological Security

The attack was instantaneous, brutal, and thorough; the response was slow, complex, and faltering. The attack took precise aim at an object but was otherwise blind. The response was marked by repetitive, though partial, attempts at understanding. Unlike previous terrorists, such as the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, or nationalist militants, the hijackers did not seek to explain or justify their act. The victims, by contrast, asked themselves such questions as: Did we bring this on ourselves? Could we have done something differently? How has the world changed, and what can we do to affect this change? If we are going to fight, what are we fighting for? Finally, the attack was quintessentially and simply an act of violence. The response has included violence, but as a subordinate part of a far more complex whole. One way to describe the relation between the act and the response is to call attention to the process of dereification. Presumably, the hijackers chose the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as icons of US greed, arrogance, and impiety. In the response, however, such iconic objects were deconstructed into the individuals or groups that made them up. The deconstruction was an effort to give meaning to an act that was perceived as incomprehensible. It proceeded through the pictures of the “missing” found everywhere in New York for many weeks after the destruction of the towers, through the New York Times project of publishing capsule biographies of each and every victim, and through the attempt to find every shard or bone fragment by which an individual could be identified, even though this enormously prolonged the clean-up process and deferred the achievement of “closure.” In the process of dereification, the ordinary and the everyday were infused with rich new meanings. Typical titles of the New York Timesobituaries were “Outdancing her Husband,” “She also Tended Bar,” and “He Wanted More Children.” The shopping emporia and the office suite suddenly appeared as something other than degraded sites of consumerism and money-grubbing. The sense in which such terms as “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “Zionism,” and “racism” obscured human lives and intentions became unmistakable. Particularly striking was the revelation that the many brokerage firms housed in the World Trade Center were staffed by upwardly-mobile working-class men from Brooklyn,