A decade on, the vio­lence of September the 11th, 2001 still haunts the lib­er­al imag­i­nary of threat. And I guess by this what I mean is that the vio­lence of that fate­ful day now under­writes all forms of lib­er­al secu­ri­ty gov­er­nance, glob­al­ly. And I think this in many ways is of course under­stand­able. I per­son­al­ly find myself some­times deeply trou­bled by that fate­ful predica­ment faced by those peo­ple who decid­ed to take their own lives on that hor­ri­fy­ing day. However in spite of this, I think our response rep­re­sents noth­ing short of a pro­found fail­ure of the polit­i­cal and the philo­soph­i­cal imagination.