Trauma and Responses to September 11

In this paper I do two things. First, I provide a brief background discussion of how trauma can be understood, and I relate trauma to specific notions of security and particular forms of sovereign power and political community. Second, I examine four ways of responding to trauma in the aftermath of September 11. I ask how each works in the aftermath of trauma, what each entails in practical terms, and what the problems of each might be.