Drafts by Daniel Hourigan
This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Mié... more This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Miéville’s acclaim and popularity among the genre fiction communities often overlooks his political commitment to a Marxist view of law. At the same time, literary criticism of Miéville’s fiction tends to flatten this Marxist politik by ignoring its historical indebtedness to Pashukanian and Trotskyist lines of thought in Miéville’s critical and creative works. This article responds to both of these vectors by asserting that there is a significant and hitherto unexplored difference in the frame of possibilities to imagine law in the Weird speculative fictions that Miéville composes.
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Law and literature's advance into affectivity brings with it an assumption that it may dispense w... more Law and literature's advance into affectivity brings with it an assumption that it may dispense with psychoanalysis and sublate the literary. This discussion engages with Greta Olson's recent survey of this development to the end of unearthing some insights into the relation between affectivity and narrative in law and literature as an interdisciplinary field. Further, the recent expositions on Spinoza by Slavoj Žižek and Aglaia Kiarina Kordela are considered in an attempt to disturb the Deleuzian misreading of Spinoza that underlies some significant assumptions of affect theory, particularly its rejection of psychoanalysis and subjectivity.
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The queer at play in Sulway's Rupetta reveals the tensions between the religious, heretical, and ... more The queer at play in Sulway's Rupetta reveals the tensions between the religious, heretical, and historical themes of the novel. Yet how deep does this rabbit hole go? A closer look at some of the novel's fantasy coordinates—Fairy Tales Studies, the Salt Lane Witches fairy tale, The Winter's Tale, etc—reveals that speculative Rupetta pushes the boundaries of what can be formalised as Queer Science Fiction. The axiom of this discussion is that the anti-normative stance that Sulway assumes with regard to the queer in Rupetta provides comment on the twists of Queer Science Fiction and its intertextuality more broadly.
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There has been little elaboration of complicity’s etymology and how this inheritance connects the... more There has been little elaboration of complicity’s etymology and how this inheritance connects the idea of complicity to spatiality. This paper approaches the villains of China Miéville’s award-winning 2011 novel Kraken as figures that can help elaborate this resonance within complicity. Kraken is a unique novel for Miéville because it breaks with the genre strictures of the Weird before Miéville again advances the virtues of such generic procedures. Goss and Subby are Kraken’s centuries-old assassins for darkly sacred hire. Their comic thuggery is imagined with supernatural abilities to fold, stretch, and swallow in implacable pursuit of the protagonist, squid caretaker Billy Harrow, through the multiapocalypti London underworld. It will be argued that these spatio-corporeal movements of Goss and Subby align their villainy with complicity’s etymological inheritance as an invitation to comply. Composed of ‘com’ and ‘plicit’, or, ‘with’ and ‘fold’, complicity is weirded by Miéville’s villains. The horror of Goss and Subby is that their devouring violence is invited, and devout.
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It is no accident of history that the politico-philosophical coordinates of Jasbir Puar’s critiqu... more It is no accident of history that the politico-philosophical coordinates of Jasbir Puar’s critique of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages (2007) position her discourse with a grasp of current events in the North America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Puar’s criticism intervenes into the ideological naturalization of a militant nationalist queer identity that is of increasing prominence to U.S. foreign policy and rights discourse in their thoroughly critiqued modern guises. Following a tact that echoes Marx or Foucault, Puar decodes seemingly marginal events and cultural media as traces of a much greater assembly of U.S. foreign policy that inflects the ‘domestic’ experience of nationalism within the registers of sexuality and ethnicity. This ‘modern guise’ of politics or, more specifically, the politics of nation, has also been taken up as an object of critique by Slavoj Žižek. Like Puar, Žižek has investigated the power of appearances and foreign policy to rearticulate the material experience and organization of everyday life. As Puar notes, this re-assembling of everyday life produced strange monsters and absurd violence in the wake of 9/11. In one such instance Sikhs taxi drivers in New York City were mistaken for the visage of a Muslim Other, then coded in frightful paranoia as an enemy to American national identity, and beaten. In light of Puar’s work before and after Terrorist Assemblages, such as the excellent critique of the construction of ‘the terrorist other’ co-authored with Amit S. Rai Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots (2002), it is clear that such acts of ethnic violence are probable outcomes of the ideological mystification of terrorism. Such a critical view of terrorism and nationalism is shared by Žižek despite his preferences for German philosophical traditions and Lacanian psychoanalysis which some theorists are quick to dismiss as mutually exclusive to Puar’s Deleuzian and Foucaultian critical inheritances. But are Puar and Žižek really so far apart? The aim of this discussion is to investigate and compare the politico-philosophical coordinates of nationalism in the work of both Puar and Žižek to the end of examining how the form of their intellectual genealogies may provide some common ground to understand the limits of the possibility for a critique of nation today.
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Papers by Daniel Hourigan
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Social Science Research Network, 2010
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A review of Richard D. Chessick's 'The Future of Psychoanalysis'
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Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, May 20, 2014
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Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, May 20, 2014
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Cosmos and history: the journal of natural and social philosophy, Nov 24, 2009
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Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture, 2006
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Social Science Research Network, Nov 29, 2012
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Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Jun 5, 2023
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Griffith law review, 2012
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Journal of Sociology, Mar 1, 2011
agencies (‘instant sex agencies’ as Bauman calls them, ‘cutting effort to an absolute minimum’), ... more agencies (‘instant sex agencies’ as Bauman calls them, ‘cutting effort to an absolute minimum’), the ‘virtual city’ of the online world and how Generation Y will relate to what Bauman regards as inauthentic approaches to love and relationships. The inference is that love has become temporal and commoditized, with the perceived risks of a solid (i.e. modernist) relationship being mitigated. This book is well worth reading and covers an extensive range of topics in the social sciences. The conversations are patchy in areas and equivocate stylistically between modernist and postmodern forms of analysis (as Bauman himself does in his arguments). The concept of ‘liquid modernity’ – supported by consumer capitalism – has particular resonance, especially in the affluent developed world economies. Although some conversations could be more tightly edited, given they represent the contemporary reflections of the intellectually sharp 84-year-old Bauman, this is a welcome piece of sociology – particularly for those already familiar with his prodigious work.
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Social Science Research Network, 2011
This paper examines the place of Chaos in what Quentin Meillassoux suggests is the ‘necessity of ... more This paper examines the place of Chaos in what Quentin Meillassoux suggests is the ‘necessity of contingency’, the critical reception of this reading of Chaos by Slavoj Žižek, and the obsessional mode of logos facilitated by such a reading. Rather than merely repeat the insights of Meillassoux and Žižek, the discussion will push toward some critical comments on the status of the philosophical subject supposed by Žižek’s critique of Meillassoux and the analysis of logos more broadly when grounded upon the primordial contingent act of the withdrawal from Chaos reinterpreted by Žižek as Nothing. Drawing on Žižek’s readings of Hegel and Schelling, it will be shown how the ‘tarrying with the contingent’ engaged in by both Meillassoux and Žižek opens the subject of such a philosophical analysis to an obsessive terrain of contingency’s maddening infinite demand: to not stop not being.
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Law, Culture and the Humanities, May 25, 2011
This article critically examines the construction of law in China Miéville’s weird detective narr... more This article critically examines the construction of law in China Miéville’s weird detective narrative The City & The City (2009). The discussion charts the excesses of law’s embodiment in Detective Tyador Borlú of the Besźel policzai with and against the primordial natural law discourse of the Law of Breach, and carefully examines the ways that this Law interdicts the common law in both parts of the fictional split city Besźel-Ul Qoma. Using the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance, this article unveils some of the modulations of authority presented by the novel’s unusual arrangement of politics, common law, and natural law.
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Journal of Australian Studies, Jan 4, 2022
ABSTRACT Dead Europe (2005) is a book about the harrowing of Isaac. The anti-Semitic logics of th... more ABSTRACT Dead Europe (2005) is a book about the harrowing of Isaac. The anti-Semitic logics of the novel inflect the familial curse that proceeds in the wake of Elias’s death, and the curse that haunts Isaac offers a re-emergence of a murderous anti-Semitic past. Yet this moment also confronts the critical reader with a choice: to embrace this supernatural motif of the curse or to shun it as psychopathology. Favouring the former, this article draws on the resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Marxist theory to analyse how this curse remains an exemplary trope. The argument will trace how Isaac is harrowed by the curse and, therein, ask what it means for Isaac to be harrowed. By looking again at the construction of the curse in Dead Europe, this article will examine some of the critical ideas that are uncovered by the novel’s supernaturalism.
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International Journal of Žižek Studies, Mar 18, 2016
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Drafts by Daniel Hourigan
Papers by Daniel Hourigan
Climate fiction or ‘cli-fic’ is an increasingly prominent genre of speculative fiction. Much of the inclusions in the cli-fic genre iterate stories about understanding the fluctuations of powers and capacities born of their fictional environments, often extremely close to our own. China Miéville’s recently published short-story 'Covehithe' from the 'Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories' collection confronts the Anthropocentric character of ecology and environmentalism. But where the Other of the Anthropocene is positioned mostly with its ecological hegemony intact by some other exceptional writers, Miéville dispenses with such orderliness as his sentient oil-rigs lurch from the oceans and on to land the world over… to nest.
the weird ecologies on show in his Bas-Lag trilogy show a kind of new materialist gardening of human beasts that realises the dangers that heteronomy brings to such diversity, from the punishments of the Re-Made to the social collectives of pirates and political renegades. This discussion offers a reading of how physical and political environments and their affects fold in upon one another in Miéville’s first trilogy.
Keywords: jurisprudence, time, Antigone, tragedy, philosophy
The ontological repercussions for maintaining a naïve phenomenological trust in the experience of the life-world are elaborated on by both Badiou and Žižek using the demonstrative example of Mallarmé’s experimental poetic modernism. Underlying Žižek’s engagement with Mallarmé is the formulation of the commands of authority in the post-modern universe as imperatives to enjoy. As an imperative, this argument about the formal structure of duty in the post-modern universe constitutes the particular mode of enjoying (mode de jouir) that valuates the variety of objects and activities able to be taken up by the subject. For Badiou, on the other hand, the poetry of Mallarmé demonstrates the pattern of a generic idea. The poetry of Mallarmé has “no mimetic, semantic, or figural relation either to an object or an author” says Badiou.
As we shall see, Badiou and Žižek consonantly turn to the modernist poet Mallarmé to understand the conditions under which the subject can attempt to access this imperative/idea. Herein two relations become apparent: ‘subtraction’ and ‘purification’; ‘subtraction’ as the removal of the imaginary contents, the ideological filler, from the subject’s self-relation in an attempt to get to the future antérieur and ‘purification’ as the attempt to purify the pure idea by locating the opaque core of the aesthetic object as the point of failure in the relation with the object. Finally, this paper aims to show that Mallarmé furnishes Žižek with an aesthetic reading of impossibility that is formatively different than that of Badiou.