Death's Dream Kingdom

Preface: The Way We Were PART ONE-THE BELLY OF THE BEAST 1. 911- America 2. Living in Death's Dream Kingdom: The Psychotic Core of Capitalist Ideology 3. Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib 4. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq 5. A Humanistic Response to 9-11: Robert Jay Lifton, or the Nostalgia for Guarantees 6. A Postmodernist Response to 9-11: Slavoj Zizek, or the Jouissance of an Abstract Hegelian PART II: TO THE LEFT OF THE LEFT 7. Bible Says: The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism 8. The Psychodynamics of Terror 9. Evil: As Psychological Process and as Philosophic Concept 10. Men of Good Will: Toward an Ethic of the Tragic Notes Bibliography Index

Walter A. Davis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Art and Politics: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre (Pluto, 2006) and Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (Pluto, 2006).

It spans social and psychological dimensions with unflinching willingness to speak the truth as the author discovers it. Davis writes with fervor, vision, and keen moral appreciation of our condition. He encourages us to see what we fear to see, to say what we fear to say. This book is illuminating, challenging, fierce. -- Michael Eigen, author of The Sensitive Self, Rage, Ecstasy, Toxic Nourishment, Damaged Bonds, andThe Psychoanalytic Mystic. What strikes me about this book is the utter originality. [Davis] has developed a distinctive voice that manages to talk about the densest theoretical concepts in the most approachable language imaginable -- Todd McGowan Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11 is an unsettling book, passionately and lovingly crafted by a superb and unique writer and thinker. Walter A. Davis skillfully uses his command of language, theater, and philosophy to dissect the type of persons that we have become in this post-9/11 nation and display for all to see the banality of evil that so marks our domestic and foreign policy. This is one of those books that - out of all proportion to its size - is packed with disturbing insights into and theories about our uniquely American character. ... Through the use of predominantly psychoanalytical tools Davis proposes a new and radical way of analyzing what ails our spirit in this failing nation state. From Shakespeare to Pinchon and from Marx to Hegel, Kant, and Lacan, he creates a whole-cloth theory of Modern America's condition using the needle and thread of Freud's psychoanalysis. From the halls of academia to the seats of government - from the altars of fundamentalist churches to the boardrooms of Amerika, Inc. - no one is spared his scathing, all-too-accurate criticism. Death's Dream Kingdom, is a much-needed diagnostic and therapeutic tool in correcting the insanity that so grips our land. -- Counterpunch The most important contribution of this wide-ranging book is its re-definition of