From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sun Mar 25 2007 - 09:31:37 EDT
Books at Duke University Press
An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of
Risk Management
Randy Martin
232 pages (February 2007)
Cloth - $74.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3979-3]
Paperback - $21.95
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3996-0]
In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American
imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a
finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’
everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk
management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for
financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the
defining element of the massive global market in financial
derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by
leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger
ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of
troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in
global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the
multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control.
Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben,
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates
a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be
countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between
those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk
taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered
“at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs
from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged
with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both.
American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a
massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace
of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or
dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.
“An Empire of Indifference is a brilliant study, both
theoretically profound and politically compelling.”— Michael J.
Shapiro, author of Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and
the Indigenous Subject
“An Empire of Indifference is the perfect answer to Thomas
Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Randy Martin well understands that
finance capital flattens and gouges at the same time. This book is
the anti-Friedman.”—Neil Smith, author of The Endgame of
Globalization
“While a great deal has been written about globalization, empire,
and international finance, I know of no other work besides this
one that looks at their intersection through the rhetorical and
conceptual lens of finance. An Empire of Indifference is a strong
piece of original scholarship on a very important topic.”—Chris
Hables Gray, author of Peace, War, and Computers
Randy Martin is Professor of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University. His books include
Financialization of Daily Life, On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism
and the Left, and Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and
Politics, also published by Duke University Press. He is a former
editor of the journal Social Text.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 / From Security to Securitization 17
2 / Derivative Wars 64
3 / Self-Managed Colonialism 97
4 / An Empire of Indifference 124
Notes 169
Index 205
Paperback - $21.95; Cloth - $74.95
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