Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
507288112
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Boca, Irina V.
Title
Meditations on the human condition in an imperial age.
Degree
Ph. D. -- Carleton University, 2008
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2008]
Description
4 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
The present study proposes a treatment of imperial politics in and through the concept of betrayal. While the European literature on empire projects the imperial experience beyond the unipolar horizon of power, the American approaches maintain a pragmatic, or top-down, view of power. These apparent contradictions, however, seem to work concertedly, deepening, or transubstantiating, imperial power into what might be called a politics of betrayal. Indeed, betrayal requires a double relationship based on some form of confidence and conceit, leadership and misguidance, trust and treachery. It always involves, or invokes, a politics of the "other"; a politics that is theoretically or pragmatically attributed to friends and enemies (almost) alike; a politics of "seeming" friendly and inimical, seeming Schmittean, or Huntingtonian, by virtue of/or betrayal. In this context, betrayal appears to produce "blowbacks", back-clashing procedures, unintended effects, undesired enmities, undertaken by ghostly and imperceptible "others". To elaborate this problematic articulation of betrayal, it is necessary to slip back and forth between the abstractness of philosophical approaches and the concreteness of current imperial practices, in an effort to overcome the reduction of politics to friend-foe machinations, economics and wars. One conclusion to be inferred from the present study is that the more imperial power relies upon the fabrication of friends and foes, the more such "ghostly" apparitions it produces, succumbing, as S. Zizek would argue, to its own phantasms. Understanding the topic of empire is further complicated by several factors. One is that today we are witnessing, as Deleuze and Guattari would argue, a thousand plateaus of imperial advances. There is the rapidly expanding world capitalist system, and with it the globalization of needs and desires, knowledges and powers, languages and images. Another is the military venture, with its warrior techniques and machineries, its ethos, its re-generative technologies. Such imperial forms are no longer simply cooperating or contending, but seem to cooperate by contending, technicalizing, or conquering, both time and space. Another complicating factor is the fact that local support for imperial power rests on a perpetually simulative and yet simultaneously reassuring form of political spectacle, one that seeks to escape the specter of public opinion by molding, conditioning and prompting it to respond to the ever changing colors of threat/indulgent perception. Imperial space appears thus as a space of fabrication and storing, in which politically relevant experiences, or "facts", are virtualized, compacted, stocked and indulged. This constitutes a narrative of power difficult to uncover, but also already uncovering itself in many ways. Although the present study engages in considerable analysis, the primary approach is a theoretical attempt to escape the strictness of conventional categories in order to keep under scrutiny the subject's integrity, or hypothetical wholeness. Our objective was to gain an understanding of the "big picture", complete with its complexities, its mundane nuances and metaphorically lucrative shapes.
ISBN
9780494334812
0494334819