Vaheed Ramazani - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Vaheed Ramazani
Exceptionalism, metaphor and hybrid warfare
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2018
ABSTRACT I argue that, in American public discourse after the attacks of 9/11, the myth of World ... more ABSTRACT I argue that, in American public discourse after the attacks of 9/11, the myth of World War II has become the dominant justificatory metaphor for the United States’ (already metaphorical) War on Terror, as broad-brushed analogies between the ‘Good War’ and recent US military adventures in Africa and the Middle East implicitly transfer the ethical values associated in national memory with America’s iconic just war onto our contemporary conflicts and counterinsurgencies. My examination of recent political and strategic discourses and practices suggests, specifically, that the ideological entrenchment the World War II metaphor has helped to shape a language of national security that rests on an unacknowledged logical and ethical contradiction: a tendency, on the one hand, to tout the humanitarianism of current asymmetrical military actions relative to the degenerate total-war engagements of the past yet, on the other hand, to figure the aims and strategies of today’s low-intensity operations in terms that are more appropriate to total warfare, for which the ‘Good War’ serves as moral alibi. By collapsing historical time and erasing, along with it, crucial distinctions between the conflicts that it brings together, this anachronistic cross-mapping of ethically and strategically incompatible structures of violence serves to naturalise what I call a hybrid culture of warfare, a fetishistic conception and practice of war that regressively mimics features of the total-war ethos while also testing the laws of war in unprecedented ways, through the use and the abuse of new weapons technologies.
September 11: Masculinity, Justice, and the Politics of Empathy
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2001
Lateral, 2018
I offer a close reading of the legal and political discourses by means of which the United States... more I offer a close reading of the legal and political discourses by means of which the United States government recently has sought to legitimate its use of weaponized drones to carry out targeted assassinations of suspected anti-U.S. combatants abroad. Situating my analysis in the context of philosophical approaches to the problem of truth and linguistic reference, I examine of cial government speeches, legal documents, and reports of civilian casualties. My semiological critique of these texts is carried out both within and against the "humanitarian" framework of just war theory, my dual approach being necessitated by the twofold strategy of the government's justi catory rhetoric: on the one hand, the government's public discourse distorts the accepted meaning of certain unambiguous and pragmatically functional legal signi ers (the jus ad bellum use of terms such as self-defense, imminence, and necessity, for example); on the other hand, it exploits the uncertainty that is endemic to some of those very same terms (necessity and proportionality in particular) when they are used to refer to the jus in bello quanti cation and valuation of incommensurable variables-of, typically, a particular number of civilian casualties relative to the amount of "military advantage" to be derived from the attack that "unintentionally" produces those casualties.
Introduction : “No Moment for Deliberation”
Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror
Killer drones and the language of international humanitarian law
The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony
Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigmsby CANDACE D. LANG
Emma Bovary and the Free Indirect Si(G)NS of Romance
War, Simulation, and the Sacrificial Sublime
Cultural Critique
Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction by Malcolm Bowie
L'Esprit Créateur
The free indirect mode : Flaubert and the poetics of irony
Vaheed K. Ramazani - Gender, War, and the Department Store: Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames - SubStance 36:2
Nervous History: Irony and the Sublime in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale
Writing in Pain, 2007
Gender and War in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames
Writing in Pain, 2007
From State of Mind to State of War
Writing in Pain, 2007
Writing in Pain: Baudelaire’s Urban Poetics
Writing in Pain, 2007
A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopediaby Laurence M. Porter
Exceptionalism, metaphor and hybrid warfare
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2018
ABSTRACT I argue that, in American public discourse after the attacks of 9/11, the myth of World ... more ABSTRACT I argue that, in American public discourse after the attacks of 9/11, the myth of World War II has become the dominant justificatory metaphor for the United States’ (already metaphorical) War on Terror, as broad-brushed analogies between the ‘Good War’ and recent US military adventures in Africa and the Middle East implicitly transfer the ethical values associated in national memory with America’s iconic just war onto our contemporary conflicts and counterinsurgencies. My examination of recent political and strategic discourses and practices suggests, specifically, that the ideological entrenchment the World War II metaphor has helped to shape a language of national security that rests on an unacknowledged logical and ethical contradiction: a tendency, on the one hand, to tout the humanitarianism of current asymmetrical military actions relative to the degenerate total-war engagements of the past yet, on the other hand, to figure the aims and strategies of today’s low-intensity operations in terms that are more appropriate to total warfare, for which the ‘Good War’ serves as moral alibi. By collapsing historical time and erasing, along with it, crucial distinctions between the conflicts that it brings together, this anachronistic cross-mapping of ethically and strategically incompatible structures of violence serves to naturalise what I call a hybrid culture of warfare, a fetishistic conception and practice of war that regressively mimics features of the total-war ethos while also testing the laws of war in unprecedented ways, through the use and the abuse of new weapons technologies.
September 11: Masculinity, Justice, and the Politics of Empathy
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2001
Lateral, 2018
I offer a close reading of the legal and political discourses by means of which the United States... more I offer a close reading of the legal and political discourses by means of which the United States government recently has sought to legitimate its use of weaponized drones to carry out targeted assassinations of suspected anti-U.S. combatants abroad. Situating my analysis in the context of philosophical approaches to the problem of truth and linguistic reference, I examine of cial government speeches, legal documents, and reports of civilian casualties. My semiological critique of these texts is carried out both within and against the "humanitarian" framework of just war theory, my dual approach being necessitated by the twofold strategy of the government's justi catory rhetoric: on the one hand, the government's public discourse distorts the accepted meaning of certain unambiguous and pragmatically functional legal signi ers (the jus ad bellum use of terms such as self-defense, imminence, and necessity, for example); on the other hand, it exploits the uncertainty that is endemic to some of those very same terms (necessity and proportionality in particular) when they are used to refer to the jus in bello quanti cation and valuation of incommensurable variables-of, typically, a particular number of civilian casualties relative to the amount of "military advantage" to be derived from the attack that "unintentionally" produces those casualties.
Introduction : “No Moment for Deliberation”
Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror
Killer drones and the language of international humanitarian law
The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony
Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigmsby CANDACE D. LANG
Emma Bovary and the Free Indirect Si(G)NS of Romance
War, Simulation, and the Sacrificial Sublime
Cultural Critique
Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction by Malcolm Bowie
L'Esprit Créateur
The free indirect mode : Flaubert and the poetics of irony
Vaheed K. Ramazani - Gender, War, and the Department Store: Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames - SubStance 36:2
Nervous History: Irony and the Sublime in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale
Writing in Pain, 2007
Gender and War in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames
Writing in Pain, 2007
From State of Mind to State of War
Writing in Pain, 2007
Writing in Pain: Baudelaire’s Urban Poetics
Writing in Pain, 2007
A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopediaby Laurence M. Porter