Taussig describes how through theatres of ecstasy, composed of fragments of the great story that the State, for the perpetuation of its spiritual authority, needs to tell about itself, these spirits are provided a reservoir of magical powers. Developing concepts of the sacred from Bataille, the post-Surreal College of Sociology, Canetti, Marx, Hobbes and Walter Benjamin, Taussig creates his own whirlwind theatre of spirit-possession, utitlizing popular shrines, official monuments and slogans, money, the police, the freeway system, automobiles, taxis, the stealing of the sword of the state and, last but not least, through fetishization of Europe's (dead) Others - Native Americans and people of African descent.
Table of Contents:
Part 1 The Spirit Queen’s Court; Chapter 1 The Spirit Queen; Chapter 2 The Mountain; Chapter 3 The Shrines; Chapter 4 Waiting for Ofelia; Chapter 5 Billy the Kid and the Break-Through Economy; Chapter 6 Holy Torpor; Chapter 7 Mimesis Unto Death; Chapter 8 Spiritual Treachery; Part 2 The liberator’s Court; Chapter 9 The Infinite Melancholy; Chapter 10 Mucoid Ignominy State-Making as Spirit Possession; Chapter 11 Kitsch is Where Fear Locks with the Mute Absurd; Chapter 12 The Accursed Share; Chapter 13 Money and Spirit Possession in Karl Marx; Chapter 14 Art Adrift in the Passing Crowd Floating Wave-Like on a Freeway; Chapter 15 Faith in Marble; Part 3 The Theater of Divine Justice; Chapter 16 Adventures in Musculature Taximetry and Dada Cinema; Chapter 17 Stealing the Sword; Chapter 18 Pilgrimage as Method;
