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Perverts,’ ‘Terrorists,’ And Business As Usual; Fantasies And Genealogies Of U.S. Law, Penelope J. Pether

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The indefinite detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is exceptional in diverse ways. It is not only the postmodern exemplar of the jurisdiction of exception into which, Raphael Gross has argued, Carl Schmitt’s political theory conjured a paradigm of nation and other rooted in anti-Semitism and other supremacist doctrines of hatred, which moved from theory to praxis in the death camps of the Shoah; it also embodies what I have called the New American Exceptionalism of the post-9/11 era. In that iteration, the U.S. makes imperialist war in the pattern of the Crusades, accompanied in the contemporary domestic political realm …