Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Illusions of a Future

Electronic data

  • Future_of_an_Illusion

    Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Political Theology on 29/08/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1462317X.2018.1513189

    Accepted author manuscript, 259 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Illusions of a Future: Ishiguro, Liberalism, Political Theology

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2018
<mark>Journal</mark>Political Theology
Issue number7
Volume19
Number of pages5
Pages (from-to)638-642
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date29/08/18
<mark>Original language</mark>English

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.

Bibliographic note

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Political Theology on 29/08/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1462317X.2018.1513189