Targets of Opportunity
On Militarization of Thinking
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by Samuel Weber
Fordham University Press
Due/Published
May 2005, 160 pages,
paper
ISBN
0823224767
The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describe the American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war against Iraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentional structure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming to destroy 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; the third and fourth treat Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" and "The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion." Weber then traces the emergence of an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself ("Network Centered Warfare"), and then in Walter Benjamin's readings. "Sam Weber has, over the years, established himself as one of the major critical thinkers of our time, a true philosopher of the event and of the medial condition. Weber extends our understanding of cognition and information networks as 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 think philosophically about life and politics." -- Emily Apter, New York University "An extraordinary book by one of our most distinguished literary and cultural theorists. Weberıs 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 an other (at the limit, by killing an other) we seek to evade the truth of our own condition."--Marc Redfield, Claremont Graduate University |
