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The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describethe American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war againstIraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentionalstructure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming todestroy a target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus’s killing of the suitors;the second concerns Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form; thethird and fourth treat Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and“The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” Weber then traces the emergenceof an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself(“Network Centered Warfare”), and then in Walter Benjamin’s readings of“Capitalism as Religion” and “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.”
Samuel Weber is Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature at Northwestern University and Director of Northwestern's Paris Program in Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous books, including The Legend of Freud, Institution and Interpretation, Mass Medianras: Form, Technics, Media, Theatricality as Medium, and Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. (Fordham)
Samuel Weber has been one of the most important critical voices within the fields of literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media theory for more than thirty years now. He is a luminous, intricate, and preeminently ethical critic whose work has helped define the stakes and tasks of research and scholarship in the humanities during this era of great transformation. . . . What is perhaps most persuasive about this book is its capacity not only to enhance our understanding of the several authors and texts with which it is concerned but also to address and explore some of the most pressing and urgent ethical and historico-political issues of our time, including war, violence, technology, media, nationalism, and sovereignty. That Weber is able to address these contemporary issues through the lens of our literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic inheritance is perhaps the best testament to his conviction that we can only address the present and facilitate a future by learning to read historically. A richly demanding work, it reaffirms his stature as one of the finest critics inside and outside the academy.
—Marc Redfield:An extraordinary book by one of our most distinguished literary and cultural theorists. Weber's main theme is that 'targeting' is an effort to overcome finitude-our human condition of being consigned to death, limited to singular times and places, and vulnerable to the workings of chance. By targeting another (at the limit, by killing another) we seek to evade the truth of our own condition.
—Emily Apter:
“Sam Weber has, over the years, established himself as one of the major criticalthinkers of our time, a true philosopher of the event and of the medial condition.Weber extends our understanding of cognition and information networksas they have been mobilized in the wake of Sept. 11 and the ‘war on terror.’. . . In addition to offering a way around the intellectual impasse of ‘terror’as a political construct, the book provides an education in how to thinkphilosophically about life and politics.”
These essays bristle with provocative and illuminating insights into the works of Plato, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin.
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