Descrizione

<p>Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violenceand biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient (ca. 3000-500 BCE) Iraqi rituals of war and images ofviolence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlyingirrational processes of war. In Rituals of War, Zainab Bahrani weaves together three lines ofinquiry into one historical domain of violence: war, the body, and representation. Building onFoucault's argument in Discipline and Punish that the art of punishing must rest on a wholetechnology of representation, Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal howthat culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare.Moreover, she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power andbiopolitics to focus on the relationship of power, the body, and violence in Assyro-Babylonian textsand monuments of war. Bahrani analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under thecategories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural.Besides the invention of the public monument of war and the rituals of iconoclasm, destruction, andrelocation of monuments in war, she investigates formulations of power through the body, narrativedisplays in battle, the reading of omens before the battle, and historical divination through thebody and body parts. Bahrani describes these as the magical technologies of war, the realm of theirrational that enables the ideologies of just war in the distant past as today.Zainab Bahrani isEdith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.She is the author of The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria and Women of Babylon:Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia.</p>