Targets of Opportunity On the Militarization of Thinking

The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describethe American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war againstIraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentionalstructure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming todestroy a target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus's killing of the suitors;the second concerns Carl Schmitt's Roman Catholicism and Political Form; thethird and fourth treat Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" and"The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion." Weber then traces the emergenceof an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself("Network Centered Warfare"), and then in Walter Benjamin's readings of"Capitalism as Religion" and "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin."

Samuel Weber is Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature at Northwestern University and Director of Northwestern's Paris Program in Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous books, including The Legend of Freud, Institution and Interpretation, Mass Medianras: Form, Technics, Media, Theatricality as Medium, and Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. (Fordham)