Rorotoko

Efforts to theorize political life in literary and cultural studies generally take the form of denouncing the policies and critiquing the dominant values of an oppressive state. Rarely do they substantively reflect upon what it means to govern a modern state, nor do they face up to the hardships that any actual shift toward a leftist politics would entail. To avoid the pitfalls posed by the disabling position of permanent critique, in which political responsibility becomes smothered in a discourse of moral indignation, I read science fiction texts in a theoretical and ethical field demarcated by two extreme, ostensibly contrary positions—the political realism associated with Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, and the ethics of saintliness exemplified by Simone Weil.

read on ›