The Art of Surrender
Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End

- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

Acknowledgments
1. The Problem of Surrender
The End
Archetypes in Action: A Word on Method
Cases of Surrender
The Archaism of Surrender
The Conditions of Surrender: Toward a Political Semiotic
Converging to Convert
The Etymology of Surrender
Etymological Coda
Surrenders as Actions in the Interstices
The Copies of Surrender
2. Witness to Surrender
Bearing Witness at Breda
What Is a Witness?
The Visual Order of the Witness
Where Is the Witness?
What Does the Witness Do?
Signatories to the Scene
Witness to a Disappearance
Looking at the Vanishing Point
Paper and Responsibility
3. The Exchanges of Surrender
The Dangers of Surrender
The Case of the Unconditional Surrender
The Nature of the Surrendering Exchange
The Objects of Exchange
Originary and Secondary Objects of Contention
A Note on the Work of Maps
Civil War Territory
The Fates of Warriors and Civilians
Transactional Objects of the Process of Surrender
Pledges, Oaths, Promises, and Pardons
Instruments and Weapons of War
Symbolic Objects of Authority and Solidarity
Tributes, Demonstrations, and Gestures
Sites of Exchange
Convergence and Divergence
4. Sovereignty and Its Afterlife
What Is Sovereignty?
Types of Sovereignty
Erotic Exchange and Vicarious Surrender
Actions of the Sovereign
Assumption and Divestment of Responsibility
The Itinerant Sovereign
How to Recognize the Sovereign
Mapping Sovereign Relations
Agency without Sovereignty
How to Represent the Sovereign
The Multiplicity of Singularity
Sovereignty at the Scene?
The Uncopied
5. The Deep Structure of Surrender
Borderline Scrutinies
Uneasy Appearances
The Political Semiotic at Conflict’s End
Demonstration and Deictics
Deictic Deferrals
Performatives and Transformations
Representations
Copies and Their Inversions
Underrepresentation and the Civil War
On the Threshold of Assumptions and Divestments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“The Art of Surrender continues and deepens one of the more remarkable projects in the human studies: Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s political semiotics of violent confrontation in the contemporary world. Through a series of virtuoso case studies, The Art of Surrender reconceptualizes strategic political action. Demonstrating the profoundly performative qualities of politics and violence, this sparkling work takes cultural sociology where it has never gone before.”--Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University
“Robin Wagner-Pacifici shows that defeat is never simply the inability to go on fighting, but a form of social organization orchestrated by its own rules. She makes beautiful use of visual and textual evidence for three archetypal cases of the Western tradition of surrender—Breda, Appomattox, and Tokyo Bay—thereby making also an outstanding contribution on the politics of painting and photography. This is a book that would delight the ghost of Georg Simmel.”--Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania
“This book is a fine piece of cultural sociology: smart, sound, and original. It is also particularly timely because it deals with sovereignty and surrender when the world political map and rights of self-government are matters of violent as well as political struggle. Robin Wagner-Pacifici peels away layer after layer of the arts of diplomacy, political ritual, and warfare as they come to light in critical moments of surrender.”--Chandra Mukerji, University of California, Davis
ASA Culture Section: Mary Douglas Prize
Honorable Mention
Art: Art--General Studies
History: Military History
Political Science: Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, and International Relations
Sociology: General Sociology
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