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Afflicted Powers - Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Paperback, 2nd edition)
Loot Price: R571
Discovery Miles 5 710
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Afflicted Powers - Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Paperback, 2nd edition)
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Loot Price R571
Discovery Miles 5 710
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In February 2003 the tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica hung in
the anteroom to the UN Security Council Chamber was curtained over,
at American insistence - not 'an appropriate backdrop', it was
explained, for official statements to the world media on the
forthcoming invasion of Iraq. The episode became an emblem: of the
state's relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as
part of - essential to - its drive to war. But was the crudity of
the attempt at censorship not counterproductive? And did not the
whole incident speak above all to the state's anxiety as it tried
to micro-manage the means of symbolic production? A manifesto for
the new anti-war generation, Afflicted Powers is the first formal
Situationist response to 9/11 and its aftermath. In a short,
readable intervention the Bay Area Report Collective take an
idiosyncratic and highly critical look at US foreign policy and the
methods it employs. They perpetuate the legacy of Guy Debord with
his hatred of the image-life, upon which so much of 9/11 and after
has revolved. Topics explored include 'Islamism and the Crisis of
the Secular Nation-State', 'Permanent War', 'Blood for Oil?'
quirkily significant book, which will resonate for years to come -
long after the current US administration has had its day. Afflicted
Powers is an account of world politics since 11 September 2001. It
aims above all to confront the perplexing doubleness of the present
-- its lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world
careers backward into forms of ideological and geo-political combat
that call to mind now the Scramble for Africa, now the Wars of
Religion. But this brute return of the past is accompanied by an
equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the
apparatus of a modern, not to say hypermodern, production of
appearances. Capital is on the move again. In the Middle East and
elsewhere it is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive
accumulation and enclosure. Now, however, it is obliged to do so in
unprecedented circumstances. for hegemony in the world of images;
and never before has the dominant world power been subject to real
catastrophe in the realm of the Spectacle, as happened to the US on
September 11. The present turn to empire and enclosure - what
Afflicted Powers terms military neo-liberalism - is confronted not
only by various forms of radical Islam but by a new kind of
vanguardism armed with the toolkit of spectacular politics. This
book attempts to rethink certain key aspects of the current global
struggle within this overall perspective, and to provide some
critical support for present and future oppositions. Its main
themes are: the Spectacle and September 11; blood for oil;
permanent war and illusory peace; the U.S.-Israel relationship;
revolutionary Islam; and modernity and terror.
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