ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault was deeply interested in the imaginative potential of space, seeing, like other Marxist critics such as Henri Lefebvre, how space generates conditions of possibility. In his project to inventively redefine the human he also understood how linguistic elements regulate prospective outcomes, and how extraordinarily implicated sexuality continues to be in the creation of these new forms of self. In a close reading of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in this chapter I argue how such radical concerns are not only to be found in the academic reaches of philosophy. Popular culture – in its most derisory form of teenage fantasy fiction – can push open new spatial-textual realms, and can come very close to exemplifying Foucault’s radical philosophical project of re-inventing the human. By also bringing in the work of Adriana Cavarero I clarify how narrative and story must be integrated into this model of spatial-textual possibility. Popular culture, far from being a denigrated simulation of canonic literature or even a distortion of Great Ideas, provides us with new cultural fora for challenging the political. His Dark Materials is an apt choice for several reasons: because of Philip Pullman’s avid public opposition to organised Christianity, its myth of the Fall and concomitant notions of original sin and sexual shame; the fantasy genre allows the reader to ‘think differently’ through cognitive estrangement; because narrative is fundamental to ideas of selfhood and this epic in three, long volumes allows a nuanced emotional world to unfold, encompassing its own psychological and theological parameters. His Dark Materials leads the reader forward through powerful empathetic identifications into a deliberate reinscription of the narrative of the Fall, a rewriting of shame. What Pullman has created is a queer heterotopia, as I shall go on to explain.
