Targets of Opportunity : : On the Militarization of Thinking / / Samuel Weber.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Weber, Samuel,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (164 p.)

The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describethe American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war againstIraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentionalstructure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming todestroy 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; thethird and fourth treat Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and“The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” Weber then traces the emergenceof an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself(“Network Centered Warfare”), and then in Walter Benjamin’s readings of“Capitalism as Religion” and “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.”

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. ‘‘A Rather Singular Strike’’ -- 2. ‘‘The Principle of Representation’’: Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form -- 3. Wartime: Freud’s ‘‘Timely Thoughts on War and Death’’ -- 4. Doing Away With Freud’s Man Moses -- 5. Networks, Netwar, and Narratives -- 6. The Net and the Carpets -- Notes -- Index