Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. The Linguistic Turn: Theories and Concepts -- 1. Language, Nonfoundationalism, International Relations -- 2. Parsing Personal Identity: Self, Other, Agent -- 3. Constructivist International Relations Theory and the Semantics of Performative Language -- 4. Breaking the Silence: Language and Method in International Relations -- 5. Three Ways of Spilling Blood -- Part II. Language, Agency, and Politics: Cases and Applications -- 6. Real Interdependence: Discursivity and Concursivity in International Politics -- 7. Criticism and Form: Speech Acts, Normativity, and the Postcolonial Gaze -- 8. The Difference that Language-Power Makes: Solving the Puzzle of the Suez Crisis -- 9. Conflicting Narratives, Conflicting Moralities: The United Nations and the Failure of Humanitarian Intervention -- 10. Language, Rules, and Order: The Westpolitik Debate of Adenauer and Schumacher -- 11. "Ce n'est pas une Guerre/This Is Not a War": The International Language and Practice of Political Violence -- Bibliography -- About the Editor and the Contributors -- Index.

At its core, security is obsessed with the survival of the sovereign order. Security tends to see the sovereign's existence as threatened by agents whose purpose is to challenge the life of the sovereign. In this article, I mobilize a theological language about the relationship between sovereignty and security to grasp the place that the question of life versus death, the fact of sovereign violence, and the problem of temporality occupy in past and present modalities of security. The notion of sovereign restraint, captured by the theological concept of katechon, is introduced to suggest that the politics of security is dependent upon a fundamentally violent, uncompromising, and often terrorizing objective: to keep at bay forces of temporal finitude seen as disorder or chaos. Forces of temporal finitude that refuse to abide by the belief in the sovereign's infinity can be described as the eschaton or as agents of eschatological time. Katechontic sovereignty, the sovereign practice intent on holding off finite ends (and on casting away agents of eschatological 'terror'), is generative of security operations that involve decisions over life and death, matters of biopolitics versus necropolitics, and encounters between the ontological vulnerability of the sovereign and 'terrorizing' agents. Adapted from the source document.

In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful & perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media & popular cultural forms (photo-journalism & television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent & shocking images of 'others' in distress or harm's way in places where America's wars are being fought. The recent FX network programme Over There & some photo-journalistic displays of dead or tortured Iraqis in news magazines or commemorative volumes are examples of the logic of sublime spectatorship. An ideology of America at war is enabled through a visual experience that consists of forcing the spectator's imagination not only to go through unbearable & shocking images but also to transcend this initial painful experience by discovering beyond it readily available reasons & larger-than-life truths that can make sense of it all & justify those horrific scenes. The production of sublime spectatorship is indeed an ideological exercise. The sublime images examined in this article suggest that an ideology of American humanism as/in war is at stake. It is an ideology that postulates that only Americans (even if they are soldiers) are equipped to provide hope, morality & humanity to the Middle East (starting with Iraq). This article argues that the sublime image of war transforms the idea of what counts as an event today into a spectacle that requires understanding, acceptance & even enjoyment to be achieved by the audience, but only at the cost of going through the ordeal of the unpleasurable image & of finally adhering to a set of ideological beliefs. Yet, in a counter-ideological fashion, this article also concludes that a more resistant event or image today, one that might open up the political to new & unplanned critical & democratic possibilities, becomes visible too. Adapted from the source document.

It is argued that since the September 11th attacks, Hollywood cinema has become full of images representing intense emotional violence, as well as extreme battle scenes. One such film is Kill Bill (Volumes 1 & 2) in which a pregnant bride is shot in the head, spends 4 years in a coma, & wakes up determined to get revenge on those who shot her. The film, directed by Quentin Tarantino, is full of implausible & unreal scenes & is interpreted in this paper as a mockery of war, revenge, & death. Kill Bill takes the violence of America's war on terror to extreme but absurd limits through cartoonish representation. It is concluded that the push of the American war machine is a comparable cartoon-like, farcical ploy. R. Prince

At a time when notions like globalization & cultural fragmentation are being used to describe the changing nature of international politics, a persistently conservative discourse of national security (re)surfaces in foreign policy literatures. The purpose of this essay is to analyze this 'new' discourse & sketch out some of its ideological intents. Referred to as 'tabloid realism,' this discourse can be found in texts authored by American scholars such as Robert Kaplan, Samuel Huntington, & Zbigniew Brzezinski. Tabloid realism is a discourse of geopolitics that resists the idea that territorial sovereignty & national security are currently being transformed. Imitating the narrative style of tabloid publications, tabloid realists seek to grab the attention of the public by providing highly sensationalistic & overtly panic-stricken representations of international affairs. By proliferating fear-inducing images of current realities & preparing for a soon to be anarchical future, tabloid realists hope to conservatively re-anchor the state to stabilizing visions of national security, geographical borders, & economic interests. Adapted from the source document.