The Penitent State: Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198831624)

This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures - especially the gesture of apology - becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised?

Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in 'healing', such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d'騁at in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population.

The Penitent State seeks to show that the key issue created by the 'age of apology' is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere, but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.

Author: Paul Muldoon
ISBN-10: 0198831625
ISBN-13: 9780198831624
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 12/21/2023
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.60w x 1.40d