Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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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
Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Postmodern World

Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Postmodern World

Gibbs, Scott

Paperback

General Political Science

ISBN10: 3838217667
ISBN13: 9783838217666
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 450
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.93 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
The ultimate source of group inhumanity is an apparition, spectacularly unrecognized and ignored. While we scapegoat tribalism and fanaticism, those impulses are merely derivatives of a deeper engine of recruitment: our unwitting loyalty to inherited identities. Toward the Turning exposes this engine, revealing how it fractures and inflames human relations. Using 9/11 and the War on Terror collision of Islamic, Zionist, and Western identities as its touchstone, the book reframes global division not as good-versus-evil, but as a theater of the absurd defined by deadly dances fueled by identity-in-difference. These identity systems function as tacit, communal compacts through which we navigate existential groundlessness. They constitute us, but they also destroy us. At their core lies an ontological misapprehension: We see the self as a discrete thing and the world as an external, given backdrop, blind to their contingency and co-constituting processes. This error underwrites the naturalization of identity, making it susceptible to the tribal fanaticism that haunts history. Scott Gibbs' fascinating monograph culminates in a call for a turning--not toward a new ideology, but a corrective understanding that can move us beyond violent, reactive patterns. When groundlessness becomes habitable, the grip of identity loosens, difference becomes negotiable, and the compulsion to control subsides.

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