Juridical dread and the self-disciplining subject

• Published in: Postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies 2022-06, Vol.13 (1-2), p.55-79
• Main Author: Megna, Paul
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Asceticism; Cultural and Media Studies; Digital Humanities; History of Medieval Europe; Literature; Medieval Literature; Medieval period; Original Article; Slogans; Violence
• ISSN: 2040-5960; 2040-5979
• DOI: 10.1057/s41280-022-00226-2

This article situates the popular protest slogan ‘Kill the cop in your head!’ in a long history of texts that employ violent personification allegory to foster ascetic upheaval. After considering a valuable (if acerbic) critique of the slogan by Louis Althusser, it contextualises the slogan as a belated response to three premodern personification allegories, each of which asks its audience to imagine their psyche as a courtroom in which Fear dispenses disciplinary violence. It then explores a surprising connection between these three allegories and an important neuroscientific theory known as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH): they all portray fear as central to self-discipline. Instead of attempting to resolve the question of whether subjects are inherently self-disciplining or socially constructed as such, the essay’s conclusion asks how studying the ascetic traditions of the past might help us cultivate the psychic preconditions necessary for forging a revolutionary collective.