The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion

A provocative retelling of the story of political corruption in the modern period.

In this provocative retelling of the story of political corruption in the modern period, Ruth A. Miller argues that narratives of political corruption rely upon an explicitly pornographic rhetoric and have been instrumental in carving out lawless or exceptional space. Drawing upon an extensive and wide-ranging literature, she examines corruption, the erotic, and legal exceptionalism as they appear in media representations of Saddam Hussein as “corrupt leader,” nineteenth-century political cartoons, Pier Pasolini’s film Salo, Ernst Kantorowicz’s theorization of the body politic, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of biopolitics, and Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the postcolony. Miller comments on both the erotic nature of the state of exception and colonial or postcolonial manifestations of it, and presents a new voice in ongoing conversations about law, violence, and sexuality in the contemporary world.