In spite of its violent content, few scholars have asked what Dracula reveals about violence. The... more In spite of its violent content, few scholars have asked what Dracula reveals about violence. The scholarship is replete with articles cataloguing multiple forms of sexuality: homosexuality, voyeurism, coitus interruptus, sadism, masochism, and necrophilia. Dracula is also a story of competing forms of violence; the titular Count’s mythical violence opposes the hunting party’s terrestrial violence. This article examines scenes detailing violence against women, men, animals, earth, institutions, monuments, and nations to show how they provide narrative momentum. At the novel’s close a contest of natural and unnatural violence is borne out. Dracula’s supernatural ability to use violence to immortalize victims is outdone by the ability of natural violence to end life. The narrative, having been propelled to this moment through encounters between the two forms of violence, closes.
Famine in its most general sense is understood as an objective lack of nutrients in a given popul... more Famine in its most general sense is understood as an objective lack of nutrients in a given population. Preventing and eliminating famine in the world has thus far proven impossible in spite of advancements in farming and food distribution technologies. While many thinkers struggle to develop new and better ways to address the problem of a lack of food for bodies, in this essay I hope to suggest a way of thinking about bodies that addresses famine through the excess of desire. Psychoanalysis provides the coordinates for such a reevaluation of the body through its development of the drive: a concept that identifies traces of aggression and pleasure in the discourse of famine. Mobilizing an understanding of hunger as informed by a logic of desire rather than necessity, I hope to demonstrate that famine is a discursive product that develops out of the human subject's access to the signifier. Languageand the signifier in particularhas been elided in famine discourse in deference to an emphasis on the body that privileges its objectivity and does not recognize its dependence on language. The psychoanalytic concept of the drive corrects the faulty understanding of the body as an a priori objective entity by describing it instead as a sequence of impulses delivered through the medium of the signifier.
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