Abstract
This essay addresses some of the paradoxes of American understandings of violence in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It argues that many of the figurations of potential violence and terror from external sources are effacements and inversions of distinctly American forms of mass killing, including the bombing of Afghanistan in November 2001. At the same time, the essay suggests that the so-called ‘suicidal fanatics’ of September 11 in fact have a disturbing but unavowable proximity to our own homegrown suicidal killers who, since the 1980s, have carried out scores of massacres in workplaces, shopping malls, and schools. Our numbed acceptance of these domestic events as inevitable and beyond remedy or explanation is a crucial window through which to evaluate the collective fantasy of a ‘war’ on external terror.
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