Memory, Law, and Justice after 9/11

This book has argued that representations of 9/11 have recurrently been mediated by certain frames of memory (the psychoanalytic rhetoric of trauma, the triumphalist tropes of the jeremiad, and the analogical templates of Americanised Holocaust memory) in the American public sphere over the past thirteen years. These paradigms, all of which were culturally prominent prior to the attacks, have shaped the articulation of September 11 across diverse cultural, critical, and political forums. Whilst the media upon which this analysis is based are not, of course, representative of the sum of 9/11’s memorial culture, they point to a number of issues that require further exploration. Firstly, they underline the absolute impression of American innocence (and exceptionalism), eliding more difficult elements of US history. Secondly, they suggest a convergence of public and private spheres, evidencing both an over-personalisation of political discourse (as in the mobilisation of trauma post-9/11 examined in Chapter 1) and an abstraction of private loss (as in the transformation of victims into national symbols analysed in Chapters 2 and 3), leading to an appropriation of personal experience. Thirdly, these frames project a contradictory relationship to otherness. On the one hand, their standardising bent appears antithetical to alterity, yet, on the other, the continual reinforcement of a national culture of memory, and the affirmation of its particularly American attributes, enacts an imaginary ringfencing that symbolically separates the United States from the rest of the world.