Abstract
The article explores competing significances of ‘innocence,’ and the effects of its attribution to U.S. citizens in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Because traditional conceptions of innocence downplay the innocent’s capacity for knowledge and decision, it is argued we should be wary of governments’ casting of their citizens as innocents to be protected. To illustrate the impact of conceptions of innocence on innocents’ capacities, responses to a photograph of a 9/11 jumper are examined. An alternative interpretation of innocence, which instead enables agency, is drawn from Nietzsche’s notion of an ‘innocence of becoming.’