At the risk of seeming peevish, i should begin by noting that the title “what is a text today?” is not mine. this point strikes me as important, perhaps even urgent, but not because the title must be discarded. On the contrary, it has become all the more important to retain because it contains today, a word that in denoting the interval between yesterday and tomorrow used to call up that which is simply now but which in the wake of 11 September 2001 has come to connote the rupture that separates “America” from the world it thought it had been contracted to police. Thus, if one were to rephrase “my” title, would it not make sense to write, “Is there a text after 11 September 2001?” (to evoke yet again Theodor Adorno's still-haunting question concerning the link between poetry and the Holocaust)? Put this way—and why not begin by raising the stakes as high as possible?—the query tempts one to reply, “Even if there is a text that belongs to this state of exception, who could possibly care?” Are there not more pressing matters? If there are, if the matter at hand is as clear as all that, then neither you nor I have any business persisting beyond this point.