11 research outputs found
Stigma and Fear: the 'Psy Professional' in Cultural Artifacts
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.The loss of reason called madness provokes perhaps the greatest human fear, for it is reason that
dignifies humanity and separates us from beasts. The âpsy professionalsâ - those who prescribe and
administer treatments for madness - are frequently portrayed in fiction, film, comics, computer
games and entertainments, along with the mad themselves and the asylums that confine them.
Overall, these depictions are malign: the reader/watcher/player is encouraged to fear the mad, the
madhouse and the mad-doctor. Choosing to use less abrasive vocabulary to name the condition of
madness makes no difference to the terror the condition arouses, for the content of many books and
games aims to inspire fear. In spite of considerable efforts over many years, the stigma which
attaches to mental illness remains firmly in place for patients, while psy professionals also carry their
share of âsome of the discredit of the stigmatizedâ (Goffman 1968, p 43) and join patients in a
stigmatized group. Popular belief often equates the psy professions with madness (Walter, 1989).
This paper explores ways in which the fear of madness, and the stigma which clings to sufferers and
their professional carers, is perpetuated by a constant stream of popular cultural artifacts
The mimetic politics of lone-wolf terrorism
Written at a time of crisis in the project of social and political modernity, Fyodor Dostoevskyâs 1864 novel Notes from Underground offers an intriguing parallel for the twenty-first century lone-wolf; it portrays an abject, outcast, spiteful unnamed anti-hero boiling with rage, bitter with resentment and on the verge of radicalisation. A Girardian reading of the poetic truths contained in Dostoevskyâs work is able to provide important keys to explain the contemporary transformation from âfourth-waveâ religious terrorism to âfifth-waveâ lone-wolf terrorism. Such a reading argues that it is mimetic rivalry â rather than much-trumpeted forms of religious violence or cultural differences â that fuels the triangular relation between governments, terrorists and civilian victims at heart of terrorist acts. This approach is further able to blend social inquiry with an account of the individual, in fact anthropological, conditions of lone-wolf terrorism by tracing the globalisation of resentment and the individualisation of violence to the hyper-mimeticism characterising the globalisation of late modernity. Finally, a mimetic reading of âfifth-waveâ terrorism accounts for the turbulence of a global politics in which victimhood and scapegoating no longer have the ability to stabilise social order and warns against a future where violence proliferates and escalates unchecked
Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello's Fiction
The present study provides a posthumanist reading of Pirandelloâs fiction, with the aim of highlighting the authorâs specifically modernist take on animality. The first half of the chapter illustrates Pirandelloâs awareness of a zoological continuum encompassing human and nonhuman beings; particular emphasis is placed on his innovative dialogue with the nineteenth-century tradition (Balzac), as well as on the typically modernist aspects of his posthumanist gaze â e.g. the sense of a âcosmicâ detachment from human events, and the strategic use of thresholds (openings and epilogues) to undermine the anthropocentrism inherent to traditional narrative forms. The second half focuses on a specific case study, i.e. the role assigned to the tortoise in the short stories âPaura dâesser feliceâ and âLa tartarugaâ. In both texts, the protagonistâs âbecoming-tortoiseâ (Deleuze and Guattari) is instrumental to Pirandelloâs modernist critique of anthropocentrism