ABSTRACT

This chapter examines various discursive practices by which the 9/11 attacks have been made manageably knowable. One mark of these perspectives is that the book assumes that 'the attack of 9/11 was an act as terrifying as it appeared to be meaningless'; and that the various contributors have on the whole examined forms of discourse whose intellectual starting-point was simple bafflement. The point is reinforced when it is grasped that though Brooke and Binyon chose language with religious resonance, the political gist of their poems is largely secular: their ultimate value is not the Almighty, but 'England'. Recent attempts to study al-Qaeda are wholly different in character. It seems clear, then, that the intellectual project with which Said was preoccupied has little to do with the attitudes under discussion. The terminology invoked consists, for the most part, of labels that are used to draw attention to things that our antagonists are not moderate, secular, materialist.