The Force of Imagination

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction
5. Literature, Violence, and Politics 3
6. PART I. Sophocles’ Antigone or The Invention of Politics: We the City
7. Antigone and the Polis 33
8. The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial 46
9. Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home 54
10. Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual 68
11. Interlude
12. Modern Tempo— Democratic Overture, State Finale 87
13. PART II. D. A. F. de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom or The Reinvention of Politics: We the People
14. Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times 105
15. The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War 118
16. Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering “Nonpeople,” Membering “The People” 127
17. Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order 137
18. Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes 148
19. Interlude
20. Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy? 161
21. PART III. Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat or Sovereign Politics: We the Nation-State
22. Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America 185
23. Necropolitics I: From an “African Horde” to a Modern Country 202
24. Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation 225
25. Epilogue
26. The Force of Imagination 241
27. Notes 253
28. Index 323