Dislocation

Abstract

This part of the book is not designed to tell the story of “9/11” once again from a different angle. There are countless “empirically oriented” studies of the American “War on Terror,” offering rigorous analyses of the lead-up to 9/11 and the institutionalization of the anti-terror campaign. In fact, this book problematizes the very concept of a boundary between the empirical and the nonempirical. If the empirical is coterminous with “empirical evidence” or “empirical reality,” then it opens up the classical avenues of verification and falsification and precludes discursive constitutional and transcendental references.¹ The mutually constituted notions of “sedimented practices,” dislocation, antagonism, and institutionalization will instead be scrutinized through the theoretical vocabulary introduced in part III. On the grounds of a particular discourse—the discourse of the “War on Terror”—I will be able to provide more answers to the leading question of this book, namely, how it is possible to conceptualize the “crisis of the social,” and how we can best understand the relationship between crisis and social change.