The Magic of the State - Softcover

Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead-notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks-generate the magical powers of the modern state.

The Magic Of The State focuses on the theater of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead--Blacks and Indians, Europe's fetishized others--pass into the bodies of the living, creating a circulation of ecstatic bodily power. The Magic Of The State envisions power's violence, but also its adjection and attraction. This work is, in the surrealist tradition, a kind of defacement of power, and of the sacred underpinnings of modern sovereignty.