The Exceptionalist State And The State Of Exception

Author : William V. Spanos
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801899346
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception written by William V. Spanos and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics predominantly view Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor as a “testament of acceptance,” the work of a man who had become politically conservative in his last years. William V. Spanos disagrees, arguing that the novella was not only a politically radical critique of American exceptionalism but also an eerie preview of the state of exception employed, most recently, by the George W. Bush administration in the post–9/11 War on Terror. While Billy Budd, Sailor is ostensibly about the Napoleonic Wars, Spanos contends that it is at heart a cautionary tale addressed to the American public as the country prepared to extend its westward expansion into the Pacific Ocean by way of establishing a global imperial navy. Through a close, symptomatic reading of Melville’s text, Spanos rescues from critical oblivion the pervasive, dense, and decisive details that disclose the consequences of normalizing the state of exception—namely, the transformation of the criminal into the policeman (Claggart) and of the political human being into the disposable reserve that can be killed with impunity (Billy Budd). What this shows, Spanos demonstrates, is that Melville's uncanny attunement to the dark side of the American exceptionalism myth enabled him to foresee its threat to the very core of democracy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This view, Spanos believes, anticipates the state of exception theory that has emerged in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, among other critical theorists. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception illustrates that Melville, in his own time, was aware of the negative consequences of the deeply inscribed exceptionalist American identity and recognized the essential domestic and foreign policy issues that inform the country’s national security program today.

Author : Simon Mabon
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0755626443
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book States of Exception or Exceptional States written by Simon Mabon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the application of the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings in the Middle East, considering the evolution of regime-society relations that ultimately erupted in violence in the early months of 2011. Agamben's ideas of the state of exception and bare life provide important intellectual tools to understand the nature of sovereignty and the regulation of life, which has largely been missing in the study of the region. Filling a theoretical and empirical gap by exploring the concept of the 'state of exception' via a multidisciplinary approach, Simon Mabon, Sanaa Alsarghali and contributors in the fields of political science, law and philosophy offer a unique set of perspectives analysing how politics and law combine to facilitate the misuse of executive powers.

Author : Aaron Good
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1510769145
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Exception written by Aaron Good and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy. In particular, how we can understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich. To trace the evolution of the American state, the author takes a deep politics approach, shedding light on those political practices that are typically repressed in “mainstream” discourse. In its long history before World War II, the US had a deep political system—a system of governance in which decision-making and enforcement were carried out within—and outside of—public institutions. It was a system that always included some degree of secretive collusion and law-breaking. After World War II, US elites decided to pursue global dominance over the international capitalist system. Setting aside the liberal rhetoric, this project was pursued in a manner that was by and large imperialistic rather than progressive. To administer this covert empire, US elites created a massive national security state characterized by unprecedented levels of secrecy and lawlessness. The “Global Communist Conspiracy” provided a pretext for exceptionism—an endless “exception” to the rule of law. What gradually emerged after World War II was a tripartite state system of governance. The open democratic state and the authoritarian security state were both increasingly dominated by an American deep state. The term deep state was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it herein refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions. Key institutions involve the relationships between the overworld of the corporate rich, the underworld of organized crime, and the national security actors that mediate between them. History-making interventions include the toppling of foreign governments, the launching of aggressive wars, and the political assassinations of the 1960s. The book concludes by assessing the prospects for a revival of US democracy.

Author : Giorgio Agamben
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226009247
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book State of Exception written by Giorgio Agamben and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Author : Gary Gerstle
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022671246X
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book States of Exception in American History written by Gary Gerstle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system. The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.

Author : Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350012815
Total Pages : 800 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory written by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, this book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields. In addition, the book includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.

Author : Brian T. Edwards
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226185079
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Globalizing American Studies written by Brian T. Edwards and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture.

Author : Amira Jarmakani
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479820865
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An Imperialist Love Story written by Amira Jarmakani and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A curious figure stalks the pages of a distinct subset of mass-market romance novels, aptly called “desert romances.” Animalistic yet sensitive, dark and attractive, the desert prince or sheikh emanates manliness and raw, sexual power. In the years since September 11, 2001, the sheikh character has steadily risen in popularity in romance novels, even while depictions of Arab masculinity as backward and violent in nature have dominated the cultural landscape. An Imperialist Love Story contributes to the broader conversation about the legacy of orientalist representations of Arabs in Western popular culture. Combining close readings of novels, discursive analysis of blogs and forums, and interviews with authors, Jarmakani explores popular investments in the war on terror by examining the collisions between fantasy and reality in desert romances. Focusing on issues of security, freedom, and liberal multiculturalism, she foregrounds the role that desire plays in contemporary formations of U.S. imperialism. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and cultural studies, An Imperialist Love Story offers a radical reinterpretation of the war on terror, demonstrating romance to be a powerful framework for understanding how it works, and how it perseveres.

Author : Joseph Fichtelberg
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031078454
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Exceptional Violence and the Crisis of Classic American Literature written by Joseph Fichtelberg and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary study of antebellum American literature and the problem of political emergency. Arguing that the United States endured sustained conflicts over the nature and operation of sovereignty in the unsettled era from the Founding to the Civil War, the book presents two forms of governance: local and regional control, and national governance. The period’s states of exception arose from these clashing imperatives, creating contests over land, finance, and, above all, slavery, that drove national politics. Extensively employing the political and cultural insights of Walter Benjamin, this book surveys antebellum American writers to understand how they situated themselves and their work in relation to these episodes, specifically focusing on the experience of violence. Exploring the work of Edgar Allan Poe, ex-slave narrators like Moses Roper and Henry Bibb, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, the book applies some central aspects of Walter Benjamin’s literary and cultural criticism to the deep investment in pain in antebellum politics and culture.

Author : Andrew Hebard
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110702806X
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910 written by Andrew Hebard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines trends in American literature and sheds new light on the legal history of race relations during the Progressive Era.