Carry a Torch for Your Enemy: Žižekian Study of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Main Article Content
Abstract
In Žižek’s belief, by the advent of capitalism in its global dimensions, violence took on different shapes and keeps on reshaping in various other forms. Things which decades ago were perceived as normal and nonviolent may render themselves today as harassment, violent and racist. For Žižek, “objective” violence within the system is the engine causing such violence. In a more challenging declaration, he contends that the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point which will endanger environment and societies. This study aims to survey Žižek’s mentioned premise and also his theory of violence within Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It will conclude by deducing that the world depicted in this novel could be regarded as a codicil to Žižek’s mentioned will. This deduction means that the way in which The Road features its dire reality, could be deemed a metaphor compatible with Žižek’s prognostication about the future of capitalism.
Article Details
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. California: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, H. 1970. On violence. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Javanovich.
Blasi, G. 2014. Reading allegory and nature in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Towards a non-anthropocentric vision of the language of nature. Arcadia 49(1): 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2014-0006
Bloom, H. 2009. Cormac McCarthy (Bloom’s modern critical views). New York: Chelsea House Publications.
Bolman, B. 2012. Seeking peace, finding the violence of the real: Traumatic ecologies and the post-political resent. International Journal of Žižek Studies 6(1): 1–19.
Cant, J. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge.
Dash, G. 2013. The Traumatic limit to realizing nature informing Žižek-ian ecology through a consideration of eco-Marxist theory and the conception of the metabolic rift as the traumatic limit to understanding ecology. International Journal of Žižek Studies 7(3): 1–8.
De?o, R. 2012. The depiction of violence in Cormac McCarthy’s novel: The Road. Prešov, Slovakia: Prešovská Univerzita.
Edwards, T. 2008. The end of the road: Pastoralism and the post-apocalyptic waste land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6: 55.
Ellis, J. 2007. McCarthy’s sense of ending. Colorado: University of Colorado.
Estes, A.K. 2013. Cormac McCarthy and the writing of American spaces. New York: Rodopi.
Foucault, M. 2003. Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976. Translated by D. Macey. London: Picador.
. 1978. The history of sexuality, vol. 1: An introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Random House.
Gallivan, E. 2008. Compassionate McCarthy?: The road and Schopenhauerian ethics. The CormacMcCarthy Journal 6: 98–106.
Gutierrez, R. 2014. Reinventing the notion of ethics: Žižek on the invisible violence of capitalism. International Journal of Žižek Studies 8(2): 1–11.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Books.
Kirmmse, B.H. and Soderquist, K.B. 2012. Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks VI. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Kneale, A.M. 2014. Hunters and prophets: Violence in James Dickey’s Deliverance, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. https://www.academia.edu/8841664/Hunters_and_Prophets_Violence_in_Deliverance_The_Road_and_Wise_Blood.
Marx, K. 2013 (1867). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production. Translated by S. Moore and E. Aveling. London: Wordsworth Editions.
McCarthy, C. 2006. The road. New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. 1978 (1891). Thus spoke Zarathustra: A book for none and all. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books.
. 1974 (1887). The gay science. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Plato. 1999. The republic. Translated by J.L. Davies and D.J. Vaughan. London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Reid, J. 2011. Towards an affirmative biopolitics: On the importance of thinking the relations between life and error polemologically. Stockholm: Sodertorn University Press.
Snyder, P.A. 2008. Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6: 69–86.
Supachalasai, C. 2014. A trauma revisited: Fanon, Žižek and violence. International Journal of Žižek Studies 8(2): 1–18.
Taylor, A., dir. 2008. Examined life. Toronto: Sphinx Productions and The National Film Board of Canada. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2UXaOJNag.
Taylor, P.A. 2010. Žižek and the media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Valenti?, T. 2008. Symbolic violence and global capitalism. International Journal of Žižek Studies 2(2): 1–5.
Vonnegut, K. 2006. Wampeters, foma and granfalloons. New York: Dial Press.
Walsh, C.J. 2009. In the wake of the sun: Navigating the southern works of Cormac McCarthy. Knoxville, TN: Newfound Press.
Walsh, K.S. 2016. Figures of violence in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: No remedy for evil but only for the image of it. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42(2): 221–243.
Warner, A. 2006. The road to hell. The Guardian, 4 November. www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4 (accessed 4 November 2006).
Woodson, L. 2008. Mapping the road in post-postmodernism. The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6: 87.
Žižek, S. 2010. Living in the end times. London: Verso.
. 2009. First as tragedy, then as farce. London: Verso.
. 2008a. Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York: Picador.
. 2008b. In defense of lost causes. London: Verso.
. 2001. Did somebody say totalitarianism? Five interventions in the (mis) use of a notion. London: Verso.
. 1993. Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel and the critique of ideology. North Carolina: Duke University Press Books.