Necropolitics in The Executioner’s Song

Authors

  • Scott McClintock National University Author

Keywords:

The Executioner’s Song, necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, death penalty, Gary Gilmore, sovereignty and biopower

Abstract

“Necropolitics” is a term coined by Achille Mbembe and it names how sovereignty persists, however, in “the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.” This analysis examines how necropolitics is a critical issue in understanding Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

Author Biography

  • Scott McClintock, National University

    Scott McClintock is an Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at National University, Riverside, California. He is the author of Topologies of Fear in Contemporary Fiction: The Anxieties of Post-Nationalism and Counter Terrorism (2015), co-author of a chapter in Thomas Pynchon in Context (2019), a contributing co-editor of Pynchon’s California (2015), and has contributed chapters to The Pharmakon: Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice (2018), Cruzar las Américas: Perspectivas Hemisféricas en Lenguajes, Literaturas y Culturas Visuales (2016), Hemingway, Cuba and the Cuban Works (2014), as well as articles in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, South Asian Review, and Clio: A Journal of Philosophy and History. He lives in Big Bear, California.

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Published

2018-10-25

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

McClintock, Scott. “Necropolitics in The Executioner’s Song”. The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Oct. 2018, pp. 130–141, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/650.