Lionel Shriver’s novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin fictionalises the experience of motherhood through a sensational storyline relating the events that led a teenager, Kevin, on a killing spree. Faced with the malevolence of her child, the narrator, Eva explores her internal conflicts, as her son’s perceived evilness leads her to acknowledge her ambivalence towards motherhood. Through the novel, the essay investigates how the construction and destruction of identity is inherently linked to a limitative social framework. The main protagonists’ non-conformist ambition leads them to encounter the limits of social signification, initially translated into an obsessive dedication to the de(con)struction of authority and ultimately to choose social self-effacement over empowerment.

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper I show how thinking from this more intimate process may transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition.

Descriptions of “aesthetic arrest,” those ecstatic moments that lift the common sense subject-object dichotomy, abound in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. These special experiences, found in both artistic and mystical accounts, arise from the daily life of ordinary perception. Such experiences enable the artist, philosopher, or mystic to overturn received categories and describe phenomena in a creative way; they become dangerous when treated as the sine qua non of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic arrest, though rare in consumer society, need not be overwhelmed by the flood of information and can still provide fresh glimpses into the world as lived.

Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist portrays a world inhabited by characters whose unified, other-proof subjectivity crumbles around them to reveal the basic fibres of the biological, organicist body as this is mutated across bodies and projected across images. Such sameness and connection are primarily played out in the language and the style used. The paper examines linguistic techniques such as the use of logical conjunction (e.g., and) and causal connectives, such as because, which instead of signaling causality, constantly rephrases the same as an expanded other, thus effectively subverting our common sense perceptions. In this context, the absence of representational means of identity resulting in the redefinition of Lauren’s subjectivity on a broader biological plane also reconciles her to the grief felt at her husband’s death.

The details of evil will sink any attempt at theodicy. But details of evil are usually- or even necessarily- lost in the abstract discussions of evil in philosophical texts. Hence this essay looks at the details of tragic fiction, specifically in some stories by Faulkner. The initial analysis endeavors to show that fiction gets us closer to the reality of agency than philosophy and so it then gets us closer to the reality of the evils that haunt both individuals and cultures (the two cannot be adequately separated). Finally, the details of the evil analyzed reveal that human beings are actually capable of a self-destruction that annihilates the very grounds of human agency and identity: Faulkner’s tragic fiction reveals that self-destruction is written into the necessary components of agency and identity.