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  • Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins by Moira Fradinger
  • Thomas Beebee (bio)
Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins. By Moira Fradinger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 344 pp. Cloth $65.00, e-book $65.00.

The subtitle of Fradinger’s interdisciplinary study points to a burgeoning field of literary criticism—and one of the few remaining places for theory in our after-theory age—that links literary studies with politics in a variety of ways, from law and literature to human rights and narrative (the latter a topic of a 2009 special issue of Comparative Literature Studies [46.1] edited by Sophia McClennen and Joseph Slaughter). Fradinger’s book joins many other fine contributions from Stanford University Press in this area. Not surprisingly, the theorists most quoted are Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarth, and Walter Benjamin. Indeed, the title recalls Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” and the thesis deals with a paradox similar to that explored by the German theorist: what relationship does the violence exercised by the law bear to the law’s binding of violence?

The book consists of an introduction and three study examples from widely divergent periods, languages, and genres: Sophocles’s Antigone (446 b.c.e.), the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1785), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat (2000). These texts are meant to represent three epochal shifts in thinking about democracy and politics: the Athenian invention of the idea, the “reinvention of politics” in the French Revolution, and Vargas Llosa’s novel as exploring the relationship between neoliberalism and dictatorship. These fictions represent an interesting range of languages and time periods; at the same time, perhaps the weakest part of Fradinger’s argument is the limitation of (re)inventions of democracy and the rule of law to these three times. Periodization according to a first, second, and third wave of democracy seems an overly telescoped view of Western history, and I would have liked to hear more about the times and texts not chosen. [End Page e-3]

Besides succinctly summarizing the chapters to follow, the introduction accomplishes two things: it clarifies the oxymoron and amphibology of the title; and it explains how literature is a form of political thinking, to the extent that the polis was a creation of the literary imagination. The paradox of democracy and law embodied in the title is a familiar one: as Benjamin pointed out, the rule of law can only establish itself through an originary act of violence of the type that it is meant to eliminate. The binding of community, for example, is achieved through the identification of those unworthy of its benefits, who then become victims of what Fradinger calls the “wild zone” of politics that is neither inside nor outside the law. Thought of this violence is foreclosed through ideology; literature is one of the few signs of this repressed material, thus becoming a “symptom” of politics.

Many have remarked on the simultaneous invention by Athenians of democracy and public theater, making an investigation of at least one tragedy (or comedy!) a necessity. The choice of Antigone is nearly inevitable, since its political message has been repeatedly cited by a variety of philosophers: thus creating, Fradinger reminds us, layers of modern concerns and readings of the play—most notably, the feminist—that obscure what it might have meant for its Athenian audience. The usual binaries used to distinguish Creon and Antigone, typical of public/private distinctions, may not have been the play’s original political point. Fradinger suggests instead a triadic conflict among possible political configurations, represented respectively by Creon, the fratricides, and Antigone: “The tension between tyranny, stasis, and democracy appears on the stage of Antigone” (43). There is one important thing that Creon and Antigone agree on: funerals are important. Antigone expresses radical democracy through her insistence on the singularity of each death and hence its citizen’s right to burial.

The critical legacy of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, though much sparser and less august than that of Antigone, has left analogously superficial readings that must be overcome: the sadism of the...

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