ABSTRACT
The Tempest shows how power perpetuates itself and shores up its interests by means of a discourse of contrived wonder. In this sense, it exposes one aspect of the art of politics, or the arts of power, which accounts for the play's obsessive interest with spectacle, drama and the production of wonder which many political readings tend to sideline and which had previously made The Tempest such apparently fair game for autotelic appraisal. The Tempest is a meditation on the way power invents a discourse of wonder to prevent consensually indecorous bodies from jeopardizing or claiming a stake in that power. Probably more stupefied than the first audiences of The Tempest were television viewers worldwide one fateful September morning when the twin symbols of the western world’s economic order flamed and then melted into nothingness. More spectacular than any Hollywood special effects, the images caused consternation, perplexity and an admixture of wonder and its obverse, awe.
