Global Powers of Horror

François Debrix is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the ASPECT Program at Virginia Tech, USA.

• Introduction: global powers of horror 1. Vulnerable bodies: rethinking camp-life and biopolitics 2. Time and the sovereign body: how security politics confronts the horror of finitude 3. Body parts of terror: rethinking security politics through the disseminated body4. Severing heads: deconstruction hors texte, or what remains of the human Epilogue: fusing remnants at the 9/11 Memorial Museum

'In this brilliant provocation, Francois Debrix courageously calls us to shift our analyses from the body to body parts, and from terror to horror. Debrix tracks the horror of contemporary global politics in a number of settings, but also uses horror to put forth a most radical, and necessary, critical intervention against regimes of terror and security.' - Brent J. Steele, University of Utah, USA'Human bodies litter the earth. Some obscured, some forgotten, some celebrated, some torn apart: these bodies have a physical, literal presence, a record of humanity written in flesh and bone. In Global Powers of Horror, Francois Debrix finally gives them the attention they deserve, tracing their political import and influence. The particularities of bodies, from the horrors of severed heads to the limits of embodied life, underpin our most resilient ideas about government, sovereignty, control, and discipline. Debrix’s focus on this corporeal reality literalizes biopolitics and the topographies and theologies of life and death. It proves an essential guide to understanding the violence inherent to contemporary international politics.' - Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA"Debrix’s book is a brilliant attempt to theorise horror and its contemporary geopolitical instances by showing how horror dismantles the human condition itself… Debrix calls for a new notion of ‘eschatological horror’, which… can open up a new space, distinct from sovereign violence and the politics of security and terror… [E]schatological horror has an interruptive and a transgressive capacity, which illuminates and actualises new possibilities for radical change in our current age of collective despair. As an assault on the metaphysics of substance, Debrix’s eschatological horror materialises the becoming of a new human/humanity without prophets, connected to a new ‘recombined, or recomposed human matter’ to come." - Ali Riza Taskale, Contemporary Political Theory, October 2017