Description
Book SynopsisThe terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. This book includes two interlinked essays that proposes the notion of virtual traumato that describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. It examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of war on terror.
Trade Review"A stimulating tour de force, The Rhetoric of Terror provides a brilliant lexicon of central keywords of our recent political life. Redfield's analysis of '9/11,' 'Ground Zero,' 'the war on terror' and other powerful slogans traces the performative paradoxes that have enabled these phrases to do such terrible work." -- Martin Harries New York University "Topics include the attacks as a mediated spectacle." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "The Rhetoric of Terror exhibits the kind of patience it finds in the literature of testimony: an "endless, scrupulous patience with linguistic deviance and mediation." Marc Redfield unpetrifies the language of emergency, showing us how a single name-date ("9/11") or place-name ("Ground Zero") can function at once as monument, wound, alarm, and oubliette. And in a stunning genealogy of the concept, he recounts how "terror" has haunted both sovereignty and theory from the French Revolution to the present. This is the most wakeful book yet about the war on terror, keeping watch with its subject intently enough to ravel out its many self-divisions and the urgent demands they harbor. " -- -Paul K. Saint-Amour University of Pennsylvania Author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination "/The Rhetoric of Terror/ is a resolutely convincing case for the power of theory in understanding and contesting the "peculiar speech acts" that sovereign power has enacted and embodied in response to 9/11 and the exceptional conditions it has been used to justify. Redfield's deep commitment to the lessons of Derrida and his knowledge of the major European philosophical formulations of war and terror from 1789 to the present enable him to provide an indispensable analysis of what he eloquently calls "the unruly figurativeness of war". War is a concept that is hideously real, and one that cannot be left in the hands of politicians and combatants. Perhaps the importance of theory for ordinary life has never been greater; no one makes a clearer case than Redfield for the urgent application of critique to the recent and current languages of political and military self-accreditation." -- -David Simpson University of California, Davis "A masterly elaboration of post-structuralist thought on the subject." -Times Higher Education "A very smart and interesting pair of essays reflecting on the cultural significance of 9/11 and the idea of a war on terror." -- -Jonathan Culler Cornell University
