Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War by Retort

Dissenting intellectuals—Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts—analyze the collision of military neoliberalism with the politics of the spectacle. Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the present's lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world careens backward into forms of ideological and geo-political combat that call to mind the Scramble for Africa and the Wars of Religion. But this brute return of the past is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the apparatus of a hyper-modern production of appearances. Capital is on the move again. In the Middle East and elsewhere it is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive accumulation and enclosure. Now, however, it is obliged to do so in unprecedented circumstances. Never before has imperialist victory or defeat depended so much on a struggle for hegemony in the world of ima