J.G. Ballard’s Politics

Book excerpt: This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard’s oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity’s grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard’s fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard’s writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political.