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This book is about the public language of the 'war on terrorism' and the way in which language has been deployed to justify and normalise a global campaign of counter-terrorism. It explains how the war on terrorism has been reproduced and amplified by key social actors and how it has become the dominant political narrative in America today, enjoying widespread bipartisan and popular support. The book also explains why the language of politics is so important and the main methodological approach for analysing the language of counter-terrorism, namely, critical discourse analysis. Then, it provides the comparison drawn between the September 11, 2001 attacks and World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor. One of the most noticeable aspects of the language surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001 is its constant reference to tragedy, grievance and the exceptional suffering of the American people. The book focuses on the way in which language was deployed to construct the main identities of the protagonists. It demonstrates how terrorism is rhetorically constructed as posing a catastrophic threat to the American 'way of life', to freedom, liberty and democracy and even to civilisation itself. The book analyses how the administration's counter-terrorism campaign has been rhetorically constructed as an essentially 'good' and 'just war', similar to America's role in World War II. Finally, the book concludes that responsible citizens have a moral duty to oppose and resist the official language of counter-terrorism.
use of the theological concept of consubstantiality, the mystery of the three persons of the trinity all being the one true God, is set in dialogue with the later Wittgenstein's public language-game philosophy. As will be shown, Wallace proposes this combinatory approach as a therapy for the mode of solipsistic, endless deconstruction which he sees as having become engrained in American culture. In Infinite Jest this culture-wide privacy is portrayed as detrimental to the family bond, producing failures of communication and an instable, continually deferred
In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. (J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians ) THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the public language of the ‘war on
certain way, it is identical with and can be substituted for the very body of his redeemer.’8 The shared imagery points, perhaps, to a deeper analogy between James’s project and the practice of Christian mysticism. Both mysticism and the new psychology were techniques for transforming hidden, introspective knowledge into public language.9 The mystics had communicated the inner presence of the divine through the body. Wracked by stigmata and paralyses, the mystical figure achieved a kind of personal Eucharist, substituting his or her own flesh for the absent body of
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
. His findings dispel some serious misconceptions about how present-day social democratic politicians in Britain and the United States might resuscitate a public language of social justice. Martin McIvor weighs up how far the recent retrieval of republican ideas by political theorists offers social democrats a promising source of fresh intellectual inspiration. He concludes that, although there is indeed much to be said for incorporating republican insights into social democracy, it is also important to correct for the individualist emphasis of republican political
meaning, and in that sense it would not be a public language (Wittgenstein 1967 : para. 269). I do not wish to disagree with Wittgenstein on this point. In fact, my insistence that meaning is reproduced only through confirm-structuration is consistent with Wittgenstein’s argument. However, I would like to add a qualification to this that infelicitous acts of structuration, which are deemed unreasonable by the ring of reference, constitute a kind of private language act . It is not a private language ; the point is that the destructuring other has rendered the initial
Tiger. They identify ‘the restricted vocabulary of the business studies vulgate [which] is applied indiscriminately to health, education, the arts, policing’ (Ging, Cronin and Kirby 2009, p. 4), as inimical to the cultivation of radical and progressive critical debate in Ireland. Yet, in the same piece, they retain a utopian faith in the transience of such hollowed-out idioms, arguing that ‘it is important to bear in mind that languages have a past and future as well as a present. In other words, the present infestation of public language with the default rhetoric of
the need for ‘composure’ that is determined by the public context as well as private need: ‘we compose or construct memories using the public languages and meanings of our culture. In another sense we compose memoirs that help us feel relatively comfortable with our lives and identities.’6 Graham Dawson defines this more specifically as ‘subjective composure’, wherein the ‘story’ the individual tells him or herself derives from the desire both to ‘compose’ a narrative and to achieve ‘composure’ in doing so: ‘the telling creates a perspective for the self within
What part does rhetoric play in sustaining empires? What is the connection between public language and the structure of imperial power? And what role does public speech play in undermining empires and bringing them to an end? This book addresses these questions with reference to a wide range of case studies, from the South African War at the dawn of the twentieth century