Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly. To pursue a reading of Christianity that extends from Hegel through Lacan to Žižek, the article argues that political theology’s future may perversely lie in a materialism emptied of all transcendental guarantees: political theology is the historically privileged master fantasy or illusion which reveals the fantastic or illusory status of our entire relation to the real in (neo-)liberal modernity. In conclusion, the article argues that Ishiguro’s fiction may thus be read less as a melancholic dystopian study in total ideological capture or surrender than as the representation of a state of immanent freedom beyond the power relations of (neo-)liberal subjectivity.
Source: Political Theology
Author: Arthur Bradley
Institution: Lancaster University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2889033595