Now and Rome Lucan and Vergil as Theorists of Politics and Space [Hardcover]

Now and Rome is about the way that sovereign power regulates the movement of information and the movement of bodies through space and time. Through a series of readings of three key Latin literary texts alongside six contemporary cultural theorists, Ika Willis argues for an understanding of sovereignty as a system which enforces certain rules for legibility, transmission and circulation on both information and bodies, redefining the relationship between the 'virtual' and the 'material'.

This book is both innovative and important in that it brings together several key strands in recent thinking about sovereignty, history, space, and telecommunications, especially in the way it brings together 'textual' theories (reception, deconstruction) with political and spatial thinking. It also serves as a much-needed crossing-point between Classical Studies and cultural theory.

Acknowledgements \ Introduction: Empire After Earth \1. Aratrum (Plough) - Hannah Arendt and the Agricultural Archive \ Interlude I: Fast Car \ 2. Fulmen (Lightning): Paul Virilio's Politics at the Speed of Light 86 \ Interlude II: Romulus and Remus \ 3. Hostis (Enemy): Carl Schmitt and the War of the Words \ Interlude III: Templum \ 4. Fas (Speakability): Jacques Derrida's Writing of Space \ Interlude IV: Terminology \ 5. Now: The Angel, the Boat, and the Storm in Walter Benjamin \ Bibliography \ Index of Passages Discussed \ General Index