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Overview
Building on Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war.
Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural. Besides the invention of the public monument of war, and the rituals of iconoclasm, destruction, and relocation of monuments in war, she investigates formulations of power through the body, narrative displays in battle, the reading of omens before the battle, and historical divination through the body and body parts. The author describes these as the magical technologies of war, the realm of the irrational that enables the ideologies of just war in the distant past as today.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781890951849 |
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Publisher: | Zone Books |
Publication date: | 03/06/2008 |
Series: | Zone Books |
Pages: | 276 |
Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Introduction: An Archaeology of Violence 9
The King's Head 23
Babylonian Semiotics 57
The Mantic Body 75
Death and the Ruler 101
Image of My Valor 131
The Art of War 159
Omens of Terror 183
The Essence of War 207
Notes 225
Bibliography 243
Index 265
What People are Saying About This
Zainab Bahrani's groundbreaking study of the arts of war in ancient Mesopotamia may seem at first glance to have only the remotest connection to the current war on terror and the war in Iraq. But her investigation of the 'magical technologies' of ancient imperial warfare could not be more timely. Beheadings, mutilations, images of torture and triumph, displacement of populations, and ethnic cleansings justified as sacred missions are just as common today as they were in 653 B.C. Instead of the divination of animal entrails, we have 'actionable intelligence' to provide the rationale for war and a set of dubious predictions of its outcome. This brilliant book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of images in war, and the way that media, symbolic representations, and ritualistic spectacles of iconoclasm play a role just as important as weapons and the movement of armies.
Zainab Bahrani's groundbreaking study of the arts of war in ancient Mesopotamia may seem at first glance to have only the remotest connection to the current war on terror and the war in Iraq. But her investigation of the 'magical technologies' of ancient imperial warfare could not be more timely. Beheadings, mutilations, images of torture and triumph, displacement of populations, and ethnic cleansings justified as sacred missions are just as common today as they were in 653 B.C. Instead of the divination of animal entrails, we have 'actionable intelligence' to provide the rationale for war and a set of dubious predictions of its outcome. This brilliant book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of images in war, and the way that media, symbolic representations, and ritualistic spectacles of iconoclasm play a role just as important as weapons and the movement of armies.
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago“Zainab Bahrani’s groundbreaking study of the arts of war in ancient Mesopotamia may seem at first glance to have only the remotest connection to the current war on terror and the war in Iraq. But her investigation of the ‘magical technologies’ of ancient imperial warfare could not be more timely. Beheadings, mutilations, images of torture and triumph, displacement of populations, and ethnic cleansings justified as sacred missions are just as common today as they were in 653 BC. Instead of the divination of animal entrails, we have ‘actionable intelligence’ to provide the rationale for war and a set of dubious predictions of its outcome. This brilliant book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of images in war, and the way that media, symbolic representations, and ritualistic spectacles of iconoclasm play a role just as important as weapons and the movement of armies.”— W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Picture Theory, What Do Pictures Want? and Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present
"Zainab Bahrani's groundbreaking study of the arts of war in ancient Mesopatamia may seem at first glance to have only the remotest connection to the current war on terror and the war in Iraq. But her investigation of the 'magical technologies' of ancient imperial warfare could not be more timely. Beheadings,
mutilations, images of torture and triumph, displacement of populations, and ethnic cleansings justified as sacred missions are just as common today as they were in 653
B.C. Instead of the divination of animal entrails, we have 'actionable intelligence'
to provide the rationale for war and a set of dubious predictions of its outcome.
This brilliant book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of images in war, and the way that media, symbolic representations, and ritualistic spectacles of iconoclasm play a role just as important as weapons and the movement of armies."--W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, and author of forthcoming Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib