ABSTRACT
This chapter examines lacunae within the masquerade and offers sight of death-effacement which is obscured from view. Security performs the masquerade of continuity and coherence by thinking life against death. The chapter examines security as sociology of death and explores the practices performed to alleviate the ontological disruption of death, destruction and mortality. Like the funeral director performing rituals upon the deceased body, security mediates the incursion of death. The discipline claims to the conceptual territories of war and security, to distinguish its remit from that of political theory, does not explore mortality despite its academic ownership of violent terrain. Zygmunt Bauman identifies two distinct phases in the significance of mortality for human culture: that of modernity's relationship to mortality, and postmodernity's relationship to immortality. The chapter addresses the practices of emergency management and memorialisation as mediating strategies contra mortality, and the amount of activity dedicated to managing and recovering bombsites that exposes the masquerade performed by resilience discourse.
