Download or read book Holy Terror written by Terry Eagleton and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy Terror is a profound and timely investigation of the idea of terror, drawing upon political, philosophical, literary, and theological sources to trace a genealogy from the ancient world to the modern day. Rather than add to the mounting pile of political studies of terrorism, Terry Eagleton offers here a metaphysics of terror with a serious historical perspective. Writing with remarkable clarity and persuasive insight he examines a concept whose cultural impact predates 9/11 by millennia. From its earliest manifestations in rite and ritual, through the French Revolution to the 'War on Terror' of today, terror has been regarded with both horror and fascination. Eagleton examines the duality of the sacred (both life-giving and death-dealing) and relates it, via current and past ideas of freedom, to the idea of terror itself. Stretching from the cult of Dionysus to the thought of Jacques Lacan, the book takes in en route ideas of God, freedom, the sublime, and the unconscious. It also examines the problem of evil, and devotes a concluding chapter to the idea of tragic sacrifice and the scapegoat. Written by one of the world's foremost cultural critics, Holy Terror is a provocative and ambitious examination of one of the most urgent issues of our time.
Download or read book Ontological Terror written by Calvin L. Warren and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.
Download or read book Philosophy in a Time of Terror written by Giovanna Borradori and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome their mutual antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work.
Download or read book Terrorism written by J. Angelo Corlett and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique book on terrorism that openly, rationally and passionately delves into what underlies terrorism, what in some cases justifies it on ethical grounds, and how terrorism might be dealt with successfully. Rather than assuming from the start a particular point of view about terrorism, this book uniquely engages the reader in a series of critical discussions that unveil the ethical problems underlying terrorism. A must-read for everyone interested in understanding the depths of terrorism.
Download or read book Dostoevsky s Spiritual Art written by George Andrew Panichas and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fyodor Dostoevsky's highest and most permanent achievement as a novelist lies in his exploration of man's religious complex, his world and his fate. His primary vision is to be found in his last five novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazov. This volume culminates twenty years of studying, teaching, and writing on Dostoevsky. Here George A. Panichas critically analyzes the religious themes and meanings of the author's major works. Focusing on the pervasive spiritual consciousness at play, Panichas views Dostoevsky not as a religious doctrinaire, but as a visionary whose five great novels constitute a sequential meditation on man's human and superhuman destiny. "A brief review cannot do justice to the profundity, erudition, and spiritual as well as moral candor displayed in George Panichas's treatise. Panichas's style combines lucidity, subtlety, and immediacy with a convincing eloquence which derives its force from a vision of undeniable truth. Hopefully, Panichas's work will receive the widest possible circulation among academic specialists, literary critics, and educated readers."--Heinrich A. Stammler, Slavic Review "One cannot put this book down without experiencing the desire to read some of Dostoevesky's great novels. As Panichas makes clear, Crime and Punishment and the Brothers karamazov are part of the Western literary canon." - FCS Quarterly "[T]he deep erudition in these pages is alive with a sympathy and a sensitivity--at times even a passion--that bespeak a real sharing in the author's prophetic vision. As few works of criticism do, this is a book that deserves its place on the same shelf with the inspired fiction it examines."--Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture "Dr. Panichas' book on Dostoevsky is, indeed, a new milestone in the immense body of literature on the Russian genius."--Sergei Levitzky, Novoye Russkoye Slovo (Russian Daily) George A. Panichas is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review. Among his numerous writings are The Reverent Discipline: Essays in Literary Criticism and Culture and The Courage of Judgment: Essays in Criticism, Culture and Society. Michael Henry studied with Gerhart Niemeyer at Notre Dame, where he received his advanced degree in political theory in 1974. He has been teaching philosophy at St. John's University in New York since 1977 and is the series editor of Transaction's Library of Conservative Thought.
Download or read book The Sublime Terror and Human Difference written by Christine Battersby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Terror written by Rasmus Ugilt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study aims to provide a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of terror, in particular the political reactions to it, such as public anxiety and pre-emptive wars, and to re-articulate the understanding of metaphysics through a consideration of its political implications. The book reveals that the key feature of terror is "potentiality," that is, terror is always about "what could happen" as opposed to "what is likely to happen." This notion helps broaden the scope of the investigation, as the argument spans the ontology, political psychology, political cosmology, and political theology of terror. Each chapter begins with an empirical discussion, examining such topics as the political practices in reaction to terror, the politics of fear, warfare, sovereignty, and the debates about the state of exception in relations to anti-terrorism laws. This unique examination of our political reality uncovers the axiom of terrorism, namely its "potentiality." Going beyond the scope of terrorism studies, it explains the philosophical underpinnings of terror without compromising on the empirical facts drawn from policymaking, jurisprudence and related fields.
Download or read book Global Powers of Horror written by Francois Debrix and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.
Download or read book A New Shoah written by Giulio Meotti and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day in Israel, memorials are held for people killed simply because they were Jews - condemned by the fury of Islamic fundamentalism. A New Shoah is the first book devoted to telling the story of these Israeli terror victims. It centers on a ...
Download or read book Torture Terror and Trade Offs written by Jeremy Waldron and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremy Waldron has been a challenging and influential voice in the moral, political and legal debates surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. His contributions have spanned the major controversies of the War on Terror - including the morality and legality of torture, whether security can be 'balanced' with liberty, and the relationship between public safety and individual rights. He has also tackled underlying questions essential to understanding the practical debates - including what terrorism is, and what a right to security would entail. This volume collects all Waldron's work on these issues, including six published essays and two previously unpublished essays. It also includes a new introduction in which Waldron presents an overview of his contribution, and looks at the problems currently facing the Obama administration and the UK Government in dealing with the legacy of the Bush White House. The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics, security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.
Download or read book The Lesser Evil written by Michael Ignatieff and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Must we fight terrorism with terror, match assassination with assassination, and torture with torture? Must we sacrifice civil liberty to protect public safety? In the age of terrorism, the temptations of ruthlessness can be overwhelming. But we are pulled in the other direction too by the anxiety that a violent response to violence makes us morally indistinguishable from our enemies. There is perhaps no greater political challenge today than trying to win the war against terror without losing our democratic souls. Michael Ignatieff confronts this challenge head-on, with the combination of hard-headed idealism, historical sensitivity, and political judgment that has made him one of the most influential voices in international affairs today. Ignatieff argues that we must not shrink from the use of violence--that far from undermining liberal democracy, force can be necessary for its survival. But its use must be measured, not a program of torture and revenge. And we must not fool ourselves that whatever we do in the name of freedom and democracy is good. We may need to kill to fight the greater evil of terrorism, but we must never pretend that doing so is anything better than a lesser evil. In making this case, Ignatieff traces the modern history of terrorism and counter-terrorism, from the nihilists of Czarist Russia and the militias of Weimar Germany to the IRA and the unprecedented menace of Al Qaeda, with its suicidal agents bent on mass destruction. He shows how the most potent response to terror has been force, decisive and direct, but--just as important--restrained. The public scrutiny and political ethics that motivate restraint also give democracy its strongest weapon: the moral power to endure when the furies of vengeance and hatred are spent. The book is based on the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2003.
Download or read book Battling Terrorism written by Jackson Nyamuya Maogoto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attacks of September 11, 2001, the US response and the international community's approval of the subsequent military action represent a new paradigm in the international law relating to the use of force. Previously, acts of terrorism were seen as criminal acts carried out by private, non-governmental entities. In contrast, the September 11 attacks were regarded as an act of war which marked a turning point in international relations and law. This exceptional and timely volume examines the use of force in the war against terror. The work is based on the central theme that the use of force is visibly enrolled in a process of change and it evaluates this within the framework of the uncertainty and indeterminacy of the UN Charter regime. The status of pre-emptive self-defence in international law and how it applies to US policy towards rogue states is examined along with the use of military force, including regime change, as an acceptable trend in the fight against state-sponsored terrorism.
Download or read book Terrorism and the Ethics of War written by Stephen Nathanson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people strongly condemn terrorism; yet they often fail to say how terrorist acts differ from other acts of violence such as the killing of civilians in war. Stephen Nathanson argues that we cannot have morally credible views about terrorism if we focus on terrorism alone and neglect broader issues about the ethics of war. His book challenges influential views on the ethics of war, including the realist view that morality does not apply to war, and Michael Walzer's defence of attacks on civilians in 'supreme emergency' circumstances. It provides a clear definition of terrorism, an analysis of what makes terrorism morally wrong, and a rule-utilitarian defence of noncombatant immunity, as well as discussions of the Allied bombings of cities in World War II, collateral damage, and the clash between rights theories and utilitarianism. It will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, international relations and law.
Download or read book Terror and Performance written by Rustom Bharucha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘This work goes where other books fear to tread. It reaches the parts other scholars might imagine in their dreams but would neither have the international reach nor the critical acumen and forensic flourish to deliver.’ Alan Read, King's College London ‘This book is not only timely. It is overdue – and it is a masterpiece unrivalled by any book I know of.’ Erika Fischer-Lichte, Freie Universität Berlin ‘The first and only book that focuses on the intersections of performance, terror and terrorism as played out beyond a Euro-American context post-9/11. It is an important work, both substantively and methodologically.’ Jenny Hughes, University of Manchester ‘A profound and tightly bound sequence of reflections ... a rigorously provocative book.’ Stephen Barber, Kingston University London In this exceptional investigation Rustom Bharucha considers the realities of Islamophobia, the legacies of Truth and Reconciliation, the deadly certitudes of State-controlled security systems and the legitimacy of counter-terror terrorism, drawing on a vast spectrum of human cruelties across the global South. The outcome is a brilliantly argued case for seeing terror as a volatile and mutant phenomenon that is deeply lived, experienced, and performed within the cultures of everyday life.
Download or read book Politics Metaphysics and Death written by Andrew Norris and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben’s radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben’s thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger—but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists’ approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben’s arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today’s most important political theorists. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall
Download or read book Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility Violence and Terror written by G. Slomp and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy principle is exposed to in-depth philosophical analysis and historical examination with the aim of showing that the political follows hostility, violence and terror as form follows matter. The book argues that the partisan is an umbrella concept that includes the national and global terrorist.
Download or read book Terrorism A Very Short Introduction written by Charles Townshend and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is one person's terrorist another's freedom fighter? Is terrorism crime or war? Can there be a 'War on Terror'? For many, the terrorist attacks of September 2001 changed the face of the world, pushing terrorism to the top of political agendas, and leading to a series of world events including the war in Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan. The recent terror attacks in various European cities have shown that terrorism remains a crucial issue today. Charting a clear path through the efforts to understand and explain modern terrorism, Charles Townshend examines the historical, ideological, and local roots of terrorist violence. Starting from the question of why terrorists find it so easy to seize public attention, this new edition analyses the emergence of terrorism as a political strategy, and discusses the objectives which have been pursued by users of this strategy from French revolutionaries to Islamic jihadists. Considering the kinds of groups and individuals who adopt terrorism, Townshend discusses the emergence of ISIS and the upsurge in individual suicide action, and explores the issues involved in finding a proportionate response to the threat they present, particularly by liberal democratic societies. Analysing the growing use of knives and other edged weapons in attacks, and the issue of 'cyberterror', Townshend details the use of counterterrorist measures, from control orders to drone strikes, including the Belgian and French responses to the Brussels, Paris, Nice, and Rouen attacks. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
