Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom

Description

Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling, Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation. Contents......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Introduction. Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom......Page 16 Chapter 1. The Venomous Eye: Melodrama, Media, and National Identity after 9/11......Page 46 Chapter 2. The Melodramatic Style of American Politics: A Transnational History......Page 80 Chapter 3. Felt Legitimacy: Victimization and Affect in the Expansion of State Power......Page 125 Chapter 4. Orgies of Feeling: Terror, Agency, and the Failures of the (Neo)Liberal Individual......Page 164 Chapter 5. Heroic Identifications; or, You Can Love Me Too—I Am So Like the State......Page 195 Chapter 6. Left Melodrama......Page 218 Conclusion. Melodramas of Failed Sovereignty: The War on Terror as a Women’s Weepie......Page 240 Notes......Page 274 Bibliography......Page 322 Index......Page 340