The 9/11 Claimant

I am fascinated by the 9/11 "claimant," though, to be fair to her, it is said that she never put in a claim for any survivors' payments; she claimed her due only in the form of presiding over a survivors' organization, giving tours of ground zero, and making speeches. It's as though the authorized version of the 9/11 trauma discourse had invented this woman.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

I think of Borges's The Tichborne Claimant, though they do not seem to share much. The Borges version is about the brash success of an impresario's putting forth the loutish, dim Tom Castro as long-lost baronet Roger Tichborne. It's the disidentity that seals the Tichborne Claimant's success, according to Borges:

If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle [the Tichborne Claimant's partner and mastermind] was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile's amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French.

This is not at all the 9/11 claimant's strategy. She has the resume of someone who worked in an important building, for an important company, on an important day:

She has told people that she is the daughter of a diplomat, and is described on the Survivors’ Network Web site as “a senior vice president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank.”

Biographical material circulated at a school where she was scheduled to speak listed her as a financial executive who had done work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Singapore and Holland for leading firms. She said that she had started out as a management consultant for Andersen Consulting.

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As for her educational background, she has told people that she has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate business degree from Stanford, though officials at both universities said they could not find records of a student by her name.

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“We had a long e-mail conversation over a two-month period, before we met, and shared our experiences,” Mr. Bogacz, who escaped from the north tower on 9/11, said in an interview. “The constellation of her experiencing the plane crash personally on the 78th floor and her fiancé’s being in the other tower and getting killed was just amazing.”

Nor did she neglect the detail of the kaiser's withered arm; her colleagues claim to have seen "the scars and marks on her arm that she said she suffered in the terrorist attack."

Collapse Is Back and Bigger Than Ever

Collapse Volume III will be available in a matter of days (mid-October, but order now; they only print 1,000). It will contain a collection of articles under the heading "Unknown Deleuze." Collapse III will not contribute to the literature that gathers Deleuze's scattered remarks on a particular topic (all those unimaginatively titled compendia: Deleuze and... Music, Film, Automobiles....). Nope; it's nothing like those. Collapse III aims to "clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?"

And Collapse III contains two newly translated articles by Deleuze, plus a transcription of the recent Speculative Realism conference. And besides, the Collapse volumes are beautiful objects.

Krapp's Last Semester

Unlike the prisoner, the graduate student cannot say "you only do two days" (the day you matriculate and the day you ex-matriculate).

[I intended here a skein of apercus, citations, the odd link or two, an incautious confession. How much more often I used to post, and with more reading to report on, when I was "on the outside."]