Targets of Opportunity On the Militarization of Thinking [Hardcover]

The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describe
the American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war against
Iraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentional
structure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming to
destroy a target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseuss killing of the suitors;
the second concerns Carl Schmitts Roman Catholicism and Political Form; the
third and fourth treat Freuds Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and
The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion. Weber then traces the emergence
of an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself
(Network Centered Warfare), and then in Walter Benjamins readings of
Capitalism as Religion and Two Poems of Friedrich H?lderlin.

These essays bristle with provocative and illuminating insights into the works of Plato, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin.

Sam Weber has, over the years, established himself as one of the major critical
thinkers of our time, a true philosopher of the event and of the medial condition.
Weber extends our understanding of cognition and information networks
as they have been mobilized in the wake of Sept. 11 and the war on terror.
. . . In addition to offering a way around the intellectual impasse of terror
as a political construct, the book provides an education in how to think
philosophically about life and politics.

An extraordinary book by one of our most distinguished literary and cultural theorists. Weber's main theme is that 'targeting' is an effort to overcome finitude-our human condition of being consigned to death, limited to singular times and places, and vulnerable to the workings of chance. By targeting another (at the limit, by killing another) we seek to evade the truth of our own condition.

Samuel Weber has been one of the most important criticl#+