J.G. Ballard’s Politics: Late Capitalism, Power, and the Pataphysics of Resistance

Description

This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard’s oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity’s grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard’s fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard’s writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political. Acknowledgements Contents Abbreviations 1 Introduction: Catastrophic Strategies 2 Celebration of Wounds: Excess, the Body, and Symbolic Exchange in Crash 2.1 Dystopian Vistas 2.2 Roads of Excess 2.3 Anarchic Bodies, or, Breughel and Bosch on the Freeway 2.4 Symbolic Violence 3 Becoming-Grass: De- and Reterritorialization in Concrete Island 3.1 Deterritorialization 3.2 Reterritorialization 4 Escaping the Subject: The Ballardian Theme of Abdication 4.1 Siding with the Object 4.2 Inverted Crusoes 4.3 Embrace the Fugues! 5 The Psychopath as Saint: Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and the Politics of Transgression after the End of History 5.1 The Violence of the Global and the Boredom of Paradise 5.2 The Spectral Reign of Global Capital 6 In Pursuit of the 21st Century: The Revolutionary Imagination and the Spectacle of Terrorism in Millennium People 6.1 Escaping the Soft-Regime Prison 6.2 Subversion, No End of Subversion – Only Not for Us 6.3 The Will to Spectacle 7 Conclusion: New Weapons Works Cited Index