RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Discipline and Anarchy: Disrupted Codes in Kathy Acker's Empire ofthe Senseless
A1 Conté, Joseph
AB Kathy Acker’s novel, Empire of the Senseless (1988), investigates the relationshipof discipline and anarchy in a postmodern Paris that has fallen to Algerian terroristsand libertine pirates. The competing principles of pain and pleasure, intentionalityand impulse, control and freedom are inextricably linked in the novel. Acker’swriting articulates a treatise of anarchism: she plunders the cultural storehouse ofWestern literature, liberating the classics through plagiarism; she violates every knowntaboo, revels in obscenity, smashes genre rules, and commits violence on her charactersthat would make the Marquis de Sade blanch. But like Sade, she displays a penchantfor discipline as control as well as punishment. She envisions her novel as athree-part structure with a rather deliberate progression of effects: the deconstructionof the patriarchal order, the liberation that follows from an end to repression andinhibition, and the formation of a new society on the very ground of transgression.Anarchism eventually runs its course without resistance, entropically feeding on thefuel of stale and repressive social order until it is exhausted. And discipline carried toany restrictive extreme at last inspires revolt.
PB Servicio de Publicaciones. Universidad de La Laguna
SN e-2530-8335
YR 1999
FD 1999
LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30333
UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30333
LA en
DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna
RD 21-may-2024