The Ideology of Tyranny The Use of Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics

The Ideology of Tyrannytraces the contemporary jargon of political correctness and the so-called 'politics of diversity' so prevalent in the academic and administrative discourse of the United States to the fantastic sociology of an obscure French pornographer, Georges Bataille (1897-1962). The celebration of violence sung in his works, re-elaborated in abstract form by the late followers of Bataille, has led to the creation of a peculiar talk emphasizing difference, antagonism, intellectual despair, and a profound political conservatism. As the so-called Left has lately come to adopt this troubling gospel of divisiveness, the consequence for a wholesome culture of dissent in our society have been a disastrous paralysis of its critical and moral faculties in the face of a new dawn of never-ending wars.

Guido Giacomo Preparata is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Washington. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in the United States, France, and Italy, he completed his PhD in Political Economy and Economic History at the University of Southern California in 1998. He is the author of Conjuring Hitler (2005).

Preface * A Genealogy of Postmodernism * The Great Mother and Dionysus * Gnostic Fragments * The Marquis de Sade: A Liberal Father to Them All * Bataille * Michel Foucault and the Social Science-Fiction of Neo-Gnosticism * The 'Mocking Varlets' of the Postmodern Left * The Tomb Raiders of the Postmodern Right: Junger's Anarch, the Neocon, and the Bogus Hermeneutics of Leo Strauss * True Power: The End of Dissent, Iran/Iraq, and the War on Terror