shared physiognomy gradually over time and only once he examines the sleeping Wilson by candlelight. The closing scene leaves no doubt: “in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev embodies this realization in the context of homegrown terrorism. But the Double does not solely, or always primarily, manifest in phenotypic duplicates or matching physiognomies. It can appear in vision (not limited to the face or physical body), voice, and manner. In “William Wilson,” before the reader learns of the uncanny similarity between both faces, the narrator indicates not only physical likenesses—height, “general contour of person and outline of feature”—but also similarities in style of dress, gait, and the timbre of voice. Indeed, the conjuring of the Double in cases of homegrown terrorism is not exclusively based on physical markers but, paralleling the racism that pervades the war on terror, is centered on cultural markers as well as behavioral ones. Chapter 3 illustrates how officials and the media communicated a frightening recognition of “something of ourselves” in Anwar al-Awlaki—an American cleric affiliated with al-Qaeda killed in a 2011 drone strike—by highlighting his familiarity and command of American culture evident in the delivery and content of his lectures. In Chapter 1, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was said to be hiding in plain sight, camouflaged by his US Army fatigues (he was a military psychiatrist). These two cases illustrate how a variety of markers of likeness are invoked even in cases involving physiognomies that, throughout the war on terror, have consistently been made other.
The amalgamation of self and other in one individual, or the splitting of an individual, is often accounted for in media and official discourse through recourse to technologies that facilitate access to that which has been deemed foreign.57 Paralleling Schmitt’s assertion that developments in technology (including communication technologies) have changed the nature of conflict, the infiltration of America or radicalization of Americans by a malignant otherness is often attributed to communications media, particularly digital media. The Tsarnaev brothers were said to live out their second or shadowy lives on social media. The Fort Dix Five were said to be inspired by the digital output of Anwar al-Awlaki (Chapter 2), who himself continued to exist as a digital doppelgänger after his death in 2011 (Chapter 3). This is by no means a recent development in the Double motif. The ubiquity of the Double in nineteenth-century literature was also closely linked to anxieties concerning new technologies and the novel forms of contact they facilitated with distant others.58 In Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the electric light allows Hyde to roam the streets of London carrying out his vile desires—much like candlelight allows the narrator to finally see his Double in “William Wilson.” In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, new technologies produce a monstrous Double. Historically and today the Double (re)emerges in and through anxieties concerning the development of a “world of perpetual light.”59 Chapter 2 illustrates the ways in which a wide variety of media and communications technologies (e.g., books, airplanes, bombs, websites) placed in ubiquitous digital and analog networks (intimately connecting virtual spaces, foreign lands, and the living rooms of ordinary Americans) are implicated in the discourse of the Double and the securitizing practices it facilitates.
Bringing the Double into the context of the collective and, more importantly, the collective at war in its contemporary form begs the question of what exactly the invocation of the Double facilitates. What does framing an enemy as a circulating potential within ubiquitous communication networks and brought to life through experiences and pressures common to everyday life (as per theories of radicalization) do to notions of belonging? What is the utility of constructing a threat “like us” and proclaiming that this “highly energized and potentially dangerous” figure is loose within the collective?60 An understanding of the function of the Double begins with addressing its status as potentially dangerous.
The simple appearance of one’s likeness, whether in vision, voice, or manner, and however disorienting, does not fully explain the horror of the narrator’s experience in “William Wilson”—tottering knees, lack of breath, and reeling mind. The Double motif is not a priori tied to terror. Not only was the Double once employed for comic effect, but in some of its earlier usages the figure signaled different variants of immortality. In Judaic tradition, the Double’s appearance was considered proof of the soul’s existence and thus man’s immortality.61 In the burial rights of Roman emperors, the use of and ritual around an effigy of the deceased signaled that “while the king may die, the King never dies.”62 However, what was once a guardian angel would come to be viewed as a harbinger of death. The presence of one’s Double took on the meaning that one’s soul had departed the body, signaling one’s ultimate doom; hence, the reference to the Double as “the fetch” in Scottish folklore.63 In literature, those who come across their Double, like the narrator of “William Wilson,” eventually, and often quickly, meet their demise. Here, the “unfamiliar” is not simply another body or figure, but an otherness sensed in the presence of the familiar, in their conflation. When Freud states that the Double conceals something under the veneer of agreeability, the implication is that what is kept from sight is ominous, disturbing, and dangerous (its potency due to its inseparability from the familiar).
The Double, pace Freud, is underwritten by the logics of not only splitting and duplication, but also doubt and duplicity, giving the many forms of likeness embodied in the Double a peculiar valence. The Double is no mere facsimile.64 In the pangs of discovering the Double’s face, the narrator refers to Wilson’s gait, voice, habits, and manner as “sarcastic imitation.” However, he otherwise admits that through these, Wilson presents an “exquisite portraiture … [that] could not justly be termed a mere caricature.” Moreover, in the climactic finale in which a mirror appears in place of Wilson, the narrator utters in response to the image in it, “Thus it appeared, I say, but was not.” Here, the narrator communicates the ambivalence of the Double motif and how it works precisely to put into doubt any clear distinction between one and one’s double. Doubt and duplicity are also evident in the multitude of terms the narrator employs to describe Wilson: brother, namesake, twin, companion, imposter, and antagonist.65
In a collective context, particularly that of homegrown terrorism, the effect of the Double translates into an inability to tell friend from foe: “the phenomenological problem posed by [doubles such as Stevenson’s] Hyde is that his deformity is unnamable. The monster cannot be expressly distinguished from normal forms,” only intensifying the existential threat the figure presents.66 The Double populates and generates what Schmitt calls “wider spaces of insecurity, fear, and general mistrust.”67 Like the narrator’s unease about when and where Wilson might turn up—doubly reflected in the narrator’s claim that their shared name is so unremarkable and ordinary that it is the “common property of the mob”—the discourse of the Double injects a similar anxiety into contemporary America. Family, friends, and neighbors of Americans who are charged with terrorism-related offenses or attempt to join ISIS exclaim in surprise at the revelation—“If he’s a terrorist, he’s the nicest terrorist I ever met in my life!”68
The Double unsettles and prevents closure: “what captures and entraps—what seems inescapable—is none other than an ever changing tendency to shift and defer, ad infinitum.”69 What this entails is, again, best illustrated in contrast to the functionality of the other. The other establishes clear boundaries and sutures a collective’s identity. It circulates within what Foucault calls relations of disciplinary power. Discipline is a modality of power that lets “nothing escape,” utilizing strategies of enclosure, confinement, and observation that materialize in a variety of spaces: the prison, the clinic, the asylum.70 All of these disciplinary spaces divide the normal from the abnormal and structure what is permitted and what is prohibited. The present-day use of communication management units (which place extreme limits on contact with the outside world) in federal prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and various other black sites in which many brown, Arab, and Muslim men (marked as
