Session 8: When Life is Larger Than Fiction

3rd Global Conference

Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Visualizing Terror: Irish Antigones and Contemporary Political Tragedies
Anastasia Remoundou Howley
School of Literatures, Languages, & Cultures, Department of Classics, National University of Ireland, Galway

The hauntology of terrorism or the so-called war on terror, has become a dominant televisual/ spectral representation of conflict in our time, as a diagnosis of the post 9/11 attacks. Removed from the Aristotelian notions of ‘pity’ and ‘fear’ in its new millennial re-workings, Antigone ironically metaphorizes the threat of modern terrorism as the alien, the other, the foreign body, the girl (paīs) -in this instance- who provocatively defies Creon’s rule from outside the body politic. In selecting the tragic/theatrical medium, it also stretches this metaphor to the centrality of the spectacle of terror that has become something of an inevitable icon in the collective imagination through visual culture and media. This paper examines two Irish versions of the Sophoclean myth focused on definite territories as a means of re-assessing and critiquing wider current social and political tragedies. Director Conall Morrison (2003) transposes the action in today’s Middle East and retells the story as an allegory of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and poet-Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Burial at Thebes’ (2004) is informed by George W. Bush’s relentless war on Iraq. In the light of a new phenomenon such as international terrorism is, these Irish Antigones visually (through performance) and philosophically re-stage and revision the limits, borders, boundaries of law and justice within today’s political and cultural global landscape, its internal/external relations, the friend/enemy (philos/echthros), native/alien dichotomy, while they seek to deal with the trauma and provide a cure (pharmakon) for the future. Transposing the critique from the terrorism of local resistance movements (that have been dividing Ireland for centuries) to the international political arena, one of the aporias this paper will come to consider is the oxymoronic notion of modern democracies and the ‘civilized’ West as having always been synonymous not only with progress and justice but also tyranny, exclusion and violence.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Fear and Terror at the Intersection of the Personal and Civilizational: An Integral Analysis
L. Michael Spath
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW)

Social scientists (eg., Fowler, Kohlberg, Erikson, Loevinger, Gebser) tell us that human consciousness evolves in stages, influenced both by personal cognitive and historical-cultural development. Richard Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene”) describes how evolutionary thought can describe both psychological and cultural-political forces, as well as shape their contexts.

These stages – worldviews, belief-systems, psychological and cultural/political evolutionary patterns – build upon and incorporate the previous stages. Each new stage believes itself uniquely true, the previous ones deficient; yet in the last decades there has arisen a new stage, Integral/ Wholistic, that recognizes the potential value in all previous stages, but also their “shadow” side, resulting in differing experiences of fear, as well as manifestations of violence and terror (the focused application of violence to instill fear).

We mistakenly ascribe terrorist violence only to one level (“Why do they hate us?”); but terrorism can be manifest at each stage – tribal conflict, intimidation, divine retribution, exploitation, liberation activism. Even the suicide bomber often acts out of delayed gratification, or heroic higher calling (Mark Juergensmeyer, “Terror in the Mind of God”), or anger at failing to advance into the next stage, than out of rage.

Harvard’s Jessica Stern, (“Terror in the Name of God”) says,
“We understand that terrorists aim to project their own existential dread shadow of cultural and spiritual defeat onto their victims. Thus, fighting terrorism also requires examining not only our propensity to overreact in the face of such fears, including by demonizing the perpetrators and their supporters…, but also how our actions and reactions play into their hands.”

Therefore, the thesis of this paper is: Recognizing the context of fear and terror, ie. the complex, multivariant stage of a particular organism, is necessary to identify an appropriate response (eg. “What do the terrorists’ particular approach say about their worldview; and what response – conquer, confront, marginalize, convert, or another – will be most effective?”).

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The Image of Horror, The Horror of The Image
Kevin Wynter
University of California, Berkeley

The concerns of my paper are twofold: I am primarily concerned with phenomenological questions of horror as affect and secondarily with hermeneutic questions around the structural mechanics of the “horror” genre in film. By first assigning importance to the philosophical question “what is horror?” and attempting to grapple with the possibility of an ontological response to this question, I endeavor to interrogate “horror” in the arts as it emerges out of the gothic tradition (Radcliffe, Shelley, Poe, James…) through the modern interpretations of Lovecraft and onward into “horror” cinema. Ultimately, my intention is to unsettle sedimented interpretations of the “horror” genre.

The first part of my paper will stage a call for specificity. It is my belief that horror is a distinctly experienced response to real and imagined phenomena that must be understood foremost as a temporal condition. Over the course of the 20th Century, horror has increasingly been confused with ostensibly related affects, especially terror (which is foremost situational and spatial). I will attempt to offer a more specific and rigorous way of conceiving horror as a way to remediate its pervasive misuse. The second part of my paper will apply my understanding of horror in order to illustrate films commonly referred to the “horror” genre are, in fact, not horror films at all – the idea being, there are certainly horror films, but there is no “horror” genre to speak of. As a result of specific historical circumstances the term “horror” has become a wide tarp beneath which all forms of abnormality in cinema are asked to take shelter. In demanding that we think horror more rigorously I wish to show – at least to some degree – how this generic classification has failed cinema studies for too long.