I am not sure that I know enough about the pre-history of 9/11 to agree or disagree. But I did think at the time that the [George W.] Bush administration took a number of cues from the Israeli government, not only by drawing on and intensifying anti-Arab racism, but by insisting that the attack on US government and financial buildings was an attack on "democracy" and by invoking "security at all costs" to wage war without a clear focus (why the Taliban?), and by suspending both constitutional rights and the regular protocol for congressional approval for declaring war.

It's not my concern. It's your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think "What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?" or "She's not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she's disavowed it?" And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything.

For instance, when "Gender trouble " is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, "Gender trouble" is old.

Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives.

So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.

We have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what's intelligible and readable and what is not.

Because Al-Qaeda has been a non-state centered organisation, many of these scenarios do not exactly apply. These are not wars between states. And yet, it seems to me that we make a mistake if we accept the view that states are fighting terrorism, since we have abundant evidence for accepting the idea of state terrorism, and what is most urgent is to track and expose how state terrorism operates under the rubric of "democracy."