Writing Radical Discontinuity

Abstract

We concluded the previous chapter by introducing the three temporal shapes that structure our discussion of the War on Terror: radical discontinuity, temporal linearity, and timelessness. As outlined there, this chapter takes the first of those shapes as its object of analysis by exploring the Bush administration’s persistent return to notions of temporal interruption and radical change in their writing of this conflict. To this end, we begin by exploring the multifaceted, and seemingly ubiquitous, representation of 9/11 as an absolutely or relatively unprecedented occurrence. Drawing on linguistic constructions of temporal, discursive, and normative rupture, as well as non-linguistic commemorative practices, I argue that the Bush administration coherently positioned those events as a radical departure from an imaginary antecedent horizon of expectable, comprehensible, describable, and acceptable normality. As such, and in contrast to much of the other relevant literature here, I do not approach those events as an initially traumatic void awaiting narrative filling. Rather, I approach those attacks as narrated as an initially traumatic, indescribable, void awaiting possible understanding with the distance of time. This positioning of 9/11 as an interruption of temporal, discursive, and normative normality, I argue, was not only important for inscribing some form of singular significance into those events.