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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Riot of Language: On the Performativity of Terrorism

Riot of Language: On the Performativity of Terrorism

Cenegy, Nick

Hardcover

General ReferenceGeneral Political ScienceGeneral Sociology

PREORDER - Expected ship date December 31, 2026

ISBN10: 3032234107
ISBN13: 9783032234100
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Dec 31 2026
Pages: 244
Language: English

This book poses alternative theoretical modes of understanding the terrorist act as disclosure through a critical appropriation of J.L. Austin's speech act theory and a rigorous exploration of the Foucauldian revision of classical claims for the parrhesiast. This book explores terrorism's performative inscriptions of ritualized atrocity and its invocation of an existential register of truth telling. Exploring the Boston Marathon Bombing as an exemplar, this work takes as its subject a contemporary terroristic pattern constituted by 1) an act of irruptive, spectacular, violence that 2) prompts (seduces) an investigation and engagement with a manifesto, and 3) results in agonistic rituals of adjudication of truth that are rarely convergent with the original intended disclosure. This phenomenon, the book argues, can be productively thought of as a failed ontological disclosure enunciated by the perpetrators. Such a failure is not the simple matter of an uncompelling rhetorical claim, or the unsuccessful transmission of information. The terrorist act succeeds, in fact, in a kind of seduction that prompts an investigation around which tremendous resources are expended. Such acts seek to catalyze a form of recognition of the perpetrator's being that is never fully realized. The existentially underwritten disclosure is doomed, then, to be passed over unheard, and yet its inherent infelicity makes it recognizable as a terrorist act.

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