Time, Violence, Identity, Politics

Abstract

I began this monograph by making two related, but potentially separable, claims. In the first instance, I observed that exploring the functions and significance of specific writings of temporality within the Bush administration’s War on Terror would tell us something rather interesting about that particular conflict. To truly understand the successful positioning of that war as a coherent, necessary, indeed legitimate, response to the events of 9/11, I argued, fully necessitated engaging with its scripting around particular claims to a privileged knowledge of time. In the second, I suggested that a careful exploration of these dynamics would also likely tell us something equally important about the relationships between time, violence, identity, and the political more broadly. The insights we may gain from our analysis of the War on Terror, I indicated, would quite possibly resonate far beyond the specific context with which we have been here concerned. In this concluding chapter, I would like now to expand on this observation by pulling together a number of the arguments we have been exploring in our discussion. But, in order to do so, it will be necessary to begin by first revisiting our more immediate focus of study.