| Call for a Reviewer |
| Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty |
| Paul W. Kahn |
| Library of Social Science seeks a reviewer for Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty. To be considered, please respond to this email, or contact oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com |
| In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn, contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law.
• "Kahn analyzes terror and torture as twin forms of sacrificial violence. An insightful and provocative challenge to the current debate.” —Ruth Grant, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Duke University
• "Sacred Violence is the best thing I have ever read about the deep connections between the will-to-violence and lingering religious archetypes.” —Dr. Paulo Barrozo, Harvard University
• "This book is disturbing, provocative, engaging, learned and essential. It challenges those of us who believe in international law's autonomy and in the possibility of a world without sacrificial violence.” —Fiona de Londras, Law and Politics Book Review
About the Author
Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. |
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| Library of Social Science is the leader promoting significant scholarship— through our renowned book exhibits, our Ideologies of War website, and our Newsletter reaching over 50,000 scholars, students and publishing executives around the world.
One of our objectives is to unravel the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence. We publish essays and book reviews by some of our finest, most insightful scholars. The writings of Paul W. Kahn have made a profound contribution.
We invite you to review his groundbreaking, Sacred Violence (an excerpt is directly below). For information on Library of Social Science Book Reviews, click here. To read a sample review essay, click here.
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Excerpt from Sacred Violence:
The destruction of bodies in modern warfare moves toward a generalized practice of torture. We have not so much abandoned the practice of torture as shifted the locus of an act of violent sacrifice. The battlefield is strewn with the disemboweled and beheaded, with severed limbs and broken bodies. All have died a terrible death in a display of sovereign power. To view the battlefield is to witness the awesome power of the sovereign to occupy and destroy the finite body. |
| Library of Social Science seeks a reviewer for Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty. To be considered, please respond to this email, or contact oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com |
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