Subtitle Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces
Publisher Routledge
EAN/ISBN 978-0415741422
Release Date 2016-12-25
Summary Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror's intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror's work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror's production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror's own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror--faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11--to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today's often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies., This concise and accessible new text offers original and insightful analysis into the concept of biopolitics. It surveys how biopolitical analysis is applicable to global life, global politics, and global security and the conceptual, practical, and ethical limits of various biopolitical arguments are also exposed. By exposing theories and their limits (readers are invited not so much to accept the presented theoretical narratives at face value, but rather to question biopolitical tenets and principles of thought and practice at the very same time that they are able to appreciate their theoretical richness, complexity, and diversity.