Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11

Abstract

Traumatic events demand a response that recognizes their impact rather than one that moves rapidly to forgetting the trauma or incorporating it into existing narratives. This article explores four reactions to the events of September 11: securitization, criminalization, aestheticization and politicization. Securitization represents the rapid reinstatement of state power and sovereign control in the face of a traumatic challenge to the state's monopolization of the instrumentalization of human life. While criminalization is less dangerous, it nevertheless involves the depoliticization of opposition and risks outlawing citizen dissent. Aestheticization can be a party to the rebuilding of narratives of nation and heroism in support of state action, but it can also provide a site for critical engagement with the reality of trauma and an acknowledgement of the impossibility of its domestication. Politicization demands a refusal of the easy categories and accepted agendas of what we call `politics' and calls for an engagement with the complexity of the events themselves in all their specificity.Peer reviewe

Between safety and vulnerability: the exiled other of international relations

“…This is what it is to experience trauma. As Edkins (2002) writes, trauma occurs when 'it involves an exposure to an event so shocking to our everyday expectations of how the world works are severely disrupted' (245). Trauma involves a loss of trust, a breakdown of everyday patterns, and an inability to make sense of the various worlds we are a part.…”

“…In the third section, I turn to different framings of the political. I suggest, drawing on Edkins (2002) that an institutional design premised on politicization offers a glimpse of the type of space that affords storytelling a prominent role in the understanding of affective citizenship. Ultimately, this article concludes by demanding a more personal, emotive, form of citizenship that welcomes the exile, and the stories they tell, into the political.…”

“…This is deeply problematic because an approach to design that fosters securitization not only denies the space within which narration can emerge, it further entrenches the experience of trauma. Edkins (2002) suggests that for those that experience trauma, the turn to securitization heightens the structures that contributed to the unfolding trauma in the first place. What is more, for an account of securitization to seem to be working there must be a scape goat, or an exile, to blame for the security threat.…”

Culture and Collective Action - Japan, Germany and the United States after September 11, 2001

“…As Jenny Edkins has convincingly shown, trauma is directly related to political community and political power (Edkins 2002 In terms of self-esteem, the United States simply pulled away from its own allies. The U.S.…”

“Those About to Die Salute You”: Sacrifice, the War in Iraq and the Crisis of the American Imperial Society

“…As Edkins writes, -trauma‖ breaks with the -linear‖ course of history and seems to remodel the familiar landscape (2002: 246). Expectations or representations about day to day life break apart, explode and seem incapable of conferring meaning to the world as it is rediscovered (Edkins 2003(Edkins et 2002. One commentator wrote about September 11th that:…”