Free Public Lecture Series - (In)Security, Surveillance and the State

Dr Mark Devenney - Reimagining the Suicide Bomber

Mark Devenney is Principal Lecturer in politics and philosophy at the University of Brighton and Deputy Director of CAPPE. He is currently writing about the politics of life and death in contemporary societies, building upon his text Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory, and recent work on the War on Terror. He has published work in the areas of post Marxism, critical theory, post colonialism and the literature of J.M. Coetzee.

In his lecture, Mark will examine the discourse of the ‘war on terror' through fear of one figure: the irrational, religious and fanatical ‘suicide bomber'.  As a key signifier of all that the free world opposes, this figure is now the subject of a whole academic cum therapeutic industry. He draws on an argument laid out in the article The Professor of Suicide Bombing, which rejects the standard interpretations of human bombing as an irrational outburst against modernity, instead treating it as a social symptom. He contends that the human bomber's act is a response to the politicisation of life itself in modern societies and believes the act exceeds the delimitation of descriptions such as ‘mad, bad or sad' by social scientific literature.

Programme

• 5.30 - Arrival
• 6.30 - Lecture
• 7.30 - Drinks and networking

To book onto this event please email corporateevents@edgehill.ac.uk

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