Reassembling Pain, Reassembling the Reading of Fiction

Book excerpt: The present book deals with Sarah Kane’s dramatic text Cleansed to show a specific negotiation of violence, pain, life and death – one that is not necessarily causal or dichotomous. Instead, a new mode of reading, based on Bruno Latour’s take on Actor-Network-Theory, helps to make fictional worlds simultaneously intelligible in a mediate and in an immediate way. This results in an unprecedented understanding of how language can influence and modify ontological configurations. Eventually, this allows for a re-evaluation of political problems that occur in the 20th and 21st century.