Of Death and Dominion: The Existential Foundations of Governance

Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2441-7
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 160 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 254 g

Reihe: Rethinking Theory

Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In ""Of Death and Dominion"", Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems. Concentrating on four types of political systems - polis, empire, theocracy, and modern mass society systems - Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the equalizing specter of death. Each of these strategies - consolation, expansion, preparation, and repression - produces a certain style of political behavior, as well as particular psychic traumas. In making his argument, Bamyeh revisits a wide range of empirical and theoretical discussions in existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative historical sociology, literary studies, and anthropology. By demonstrating how schemes of power are by definition also schemes for defying death - despite their claims to the contrary - his book encourages us to think of a new style of politics, one oriented toward life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bamyeh, Mohammed A.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword; I-Consolations; The Master as Slave; Death and Hierarchy;. Death as Degradation; The Substitution of Death; Between Philosophy and Sovereignty; II-Imperium; The Logic of Absolute Prominence; The Rule over Death; Retreat from the Ideal; From the Prosaic to the Brittle; III-Preparations; Destiny - the Uncanny Death; Fear and the Invisible; Future as Past; Sacrifice and the Sovereignty of the Soul; IV-Forgetting; Isolation and Reparation; The Heroic; The Triumph of Life; Remembering in the Age of Forgetting; Last Words: Death and Difference.

Über Autor(innen)

Mohammed A. Bamyeh is the Hubert H. Humphrey Professor of International Studies at Macalester College. He is the author of The Ends of Globalization and The Social Origins of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse and the editor of Palestine America.