| dc.description.abstract | “The Displaced Person” explores the ways in which, when faced with our own insecurity in the presence of the Other, “our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order,” or more accurately, “to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly” (Butler 30). This project situates this trend in historical specificity with regard to O’Connor’s work in order to understand that such fear is not an anomaly of hatefulness and desperation, but that it is rather a fundamental mode of social organization in a world made increasingly precarious as “[t]hese kinds of threat scenarios” are routinely mobilized in order to “(re)immunize relations of domination … the disintegration of which is depicted as catastrophic” and are deployed as a violent means of ultimately “steering and regulating the governed” in such a way as to buttress exploitative social and economic systems of organization (Lorey 44). O’Connor’s text becomes the platform through which Marxist and biopolitical understandings of social control can be put into conversation with one another dialectically, with the hope that an analysis of the microcosmic environment of the McIntyre farm will provide insights that have relevance—historical, theoretical, socio-economic, and political—to the dynamic nature of power under capitalism more broadly. | |
