ABSTRACT
The question of agency continues into chapter 3, “Transversing the Event: Beyond the Trauma of Terrorism.” Working from within the context of post-9/11 trauma and terrorism, this chapter explores how affect can become politically salient. Focusing on atmospheres of affect and currents of implication creates an alternative vision to the notion of the traumatic event, which, puncturing boundaries, only unleashed a politics of revenge and violent pre-emption. Writers including Ruth Ozeki, Kamila Shamsie and Thomas Pynchon negotiate ways of coexisting, sustainably and in empathy, with each other’s lives as they are rendered precarious by shared histories of violence; I propose that the horizons of possibility inherent in the virtual, whether they manifest in Pynchon’s digital spaces or in Ozeki’s gyres of time, offer relational time-spaces which might counteract the repetition compulsion on a nation-state level, with its seemingly inevitable re-run of suicide soldiers. Acting from within their implicated subject positions, these scarred and resistant figures initiate a relationally created present because they offer a narrative that is de-centered from the absoluteness of the injured ‘I,’ be it individual or that of a nation state, which reduced emotional horizons to victimization and vengeance in the war on terror.
