ABSTRACT
Did we ever doubt, on that fateful day, that the horrors unfolding before our eyes would not be met with an American reign/rain of fire? The terrifying uncertainty of the exceptional event and its interpretation has proved to be a chimera. The meaning and interpretation of the event are now thoroughly incorporated into a regime of legitimation for exceptional sovereign practices. Perhaps the processes and prerogatives that named and interpreted the event had a hold on it before it even happened, awaiting its capture with a well-established discourse of threat, urgency, emergence and exception. The ‘new’ appears to have only reaffirmed the ‘same: the permanence of the prerogatives of exceptional sovereign power.’
