As one of my colleagues so aptly expressed it, “The War on Terror is weird.” This book engages with ‘this’ – the excesses and uncanniness of this war. In so doing, it reflects upon the ways that the ‘War on Terror,’ as a set of practices premised upon risk, exceeds any seeming objectivity or, as I will argue throughout, exceeds the dominant critical frameworks we have available to make sense. This book engages with the excesses of the ‘War on Terror’ from the perspective of rupture – i.e., it engages with the cultural unconscious, the spectacular and the uncanny and shows how these disturb not only official but also critical accounts of the ‘War on Terror.’ Following Michel Foucault (a scholar to whom this author is deeply indebted), this book queries ‘the order of things’ that has made this war intelligible and enabled our critiques of it. It also probes the limits of these critiques and critical International Relations scholarship more generally. While the ‘War on Terror’ may be receding from the forefront of consciousness in the wake of Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump, an analysis of the ‘War on Terror’s’ excesses and uncanniness – particularly evident in the form of its ‘pleasures’ – can shed insight on these events, too. Indeed, by engaging with the war’s pleasures (that is, the pleasures of risk) and drawing psychoanalytic insights from Lacanian-inspired critical social theory, this book will argue that we may be other than who we think we are or, at least, who we have long been imagined to be within critical International Relations traditions. Furthermore, and without discounting the madness of the present, it will suggest there may be some relief in that yet.
Managhan, Tina
Department of Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2020Date of RADAR deposit: 2019-10-31
All rights reserved.