Eric Wilson

Unspeakable: James W. Douglass, Non-violence, and Political Murder

When Slavoj Zizek made his “scandalous” (skandalon) claim that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler, he may have only dimly perceived the full eschatological implications of his tireless self-promotion. Zizek’s meaning is that violence against the symbolic order (Gandhi), no matter how “otherwordly,” is of vastly greater transformative potential than any physical war against the Real (Hitler), no matter how materially destructive.2 Zizek’s deployment of Gandhi here—with all of the obvious parallels with Jesus of Nazareth—cannot be a coincidence. Apart from the Resurrection itself, the greatest scandal of Apostolic Christianity is the endlessly subversive juxtaposition between the symbolic order of the Kingdom of God as against the tyrannical violence of the Real; for Christ, the Roman Imperium. The supreme moment of political subversion within the New Testament—“Render unto Caesar…”—may, within Zizek’s terms, be understood as a clandestine strategy of the asymmetrical deployment of a transformative symbolic order against the violence of the Real.

The ballad of Ed and Lewis: conflictual mimesis and the revocation of the social contract in James Dickey’s Deliverance

This paper provides a close critical reading of the novel Deliverance (1970) by James Dickey from the perspective of law and literature. It employs the critical literary theory of René Girard in suggesting that Deliverance may be usefully understood as an interrogation, or even a satire, of the Hobbesian doctrine of the social contract. Whereas Hobbes raises the possibility, but then conspicuously fails to adequately theorize, the concept of the ‘little monarchy’ or the private sovereignty of one man in the wilderness, Deliverance is wholly premised upon both the feasibility and the desirability of man-the-hunter-as-sovereign. A close reading of the novel detects the employment of a number of critical notions of Girard – the crisis of undifferentiation, conflictual mimesis, the monstrous doubles – that collectively serve to undermine the facile assumption of the universality of the social contract as well as any clear demarcation between the realms of sovereignty and crime.

Warring Sovereigns and Mimetic Rivals: On Scapegoats and Political Crisis in William Golding's Lord of the Flies

(2014). Warring Sovereigns and Mimetic Rivals: On Scapegoats and Political Crisis in William Goldings Lord of the Flies. Law and Humanities: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 147-173.