During my preparation for this essay,1 the second anniversary of the 9/1 1 terrorist attack was being marked across the United States by ceremonies of remembrance, religious services, and 24-hour television programming. This was as it should be, to honor the dead, to tend to the wounded in spirit, and to recognize the need for understanding. But between our desire and our capacity to comprehend a world after 9/11, a vast gulf seems to have opened, and two years later, with global terrorism still a threat and Iraq a deepening quagmire, the gap shows little sign of closing, in the practice as well as in the discipline of international relations. To bridge this abyss, between an unspeakable act and unthinkable consequences, between past terror and the present insecurities, it will take more than memorials and public ceremonies (like New York City's Mayor Bloomberg's »apolitical« decision on 9/11+1 to read only borrowed speeches from the past), loopedviewings of terrorist attacks and military counter-attacks (the mind-numbing option of the major network and cable channels on 9/1 1+2), or a rash of docudramas (like the tendentious, »DC 9/11: Time of Crisis«, in which President Bush declares, »If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me«). It will take more than incarcerating suspected terrorists without public hearings, infringing on the civil liberties of citizens and visitors to America, or preventive military attacks for rooting out future threats. It will take deeper historical investigations, cross-cultural perspectives, and comparative political analyses; in other words, a critical transvaluation of the current national security discourse in the United States. Which, of course, is highly unlikely, for several reasons. First, the perceived exceptionality of the attack quickly became grounds for a reflexive act of patriotic affirmation and intellectual abnegation. Its territory under attack, the US abjured coalition politics and collective action in favor of a unilateral and pre-emptive definition of friend and foe by which the state is refortified and sovereignty is reinscribed. Second, the intellectual reaction or rather the lack of one among social scientists resembled the initial response to the fall of the Berlin wall, a profound event that was notoriously described by some »scientific« scholars as a single data point from which nothing important, that is, nothing verifiable, could be posited; it is always safer to wait for more data. Third, it is important to recognize how trauma