Carl Schmitt in Outer Space: On Cixin Liu's “Dark Forest”

IF 0.3 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE
Ian Afflerbach
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Cixin Liu's science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has sold more than 8 million copies and earned him the first Hugo Award to an Asian writer; it represents Chinese SF's breakout success in the anglophone fiction market. While his novels have received considerable popular acclaim, critics have yet to interrogate the troubling political vision they develop. The pivotal novum in the series—the new concept or creation, which Darko Suvin influentially identified as SF's chief mechanism for triggering “cognitive estrangement” in readers—is its “dark forest theory,” a set of governing axioms about life in outer space that make a necessary, inescapable hostility between different forms of organized life the fundamental political fact of the cosmos. This article argues that Carl Schmitt's political theory—his critique of liberalism, his investment in decisions made in a state of exception, and his core vision of politics as defined by the friend/enemy distinction—helps clarify the authoritarian currents in Liu's novels, as well as their break with several standards of characterization and narrative form conventional for realist fiction. By attempting to justify authoritarian order as the only adequate response to the existential cruelty of the cosmos, Liu's novels dramatize how Schmitt's notions about political enemies and heroic decisions in a state of emergency can serve to legitimate individual cruelty and collectively destructive warfare.
卡尔·施密特在外太空——论刘慈欣的“黑暗森林”
刘慈欣的科幻三部曲《追忆地球的过去》销量超过800万册,并为他赢得了首个雨果奖。它代表了中国科幻小说在英语小说市场的突破性成功。虽然他的小说获得了相当大的好评,但评论家们还没有质疑这些小说中令人不安的政治愿景。达科·苏文(Darko Suvin)认为,科幻小说引发读者“认知隔阂”的主要机制是“黑暗森林理论”,这是一套关于外太空生命的统治公理,它使不同形式的有组织生命之间存在着必要的、不可避免的敌意,这是宇宙的基本政治事实。本文认为,卡尔·施密特的政治理论——他对自由主义的批判,他在例外状态下做出的决定的投资,以及他以朋友/敌人的区别来定义政治的核心愿景——有助于澄清刘小说中的威权主义潮流,以及它们与现实主义小说中传统的人物塑造和叙事形式的几个标准的决裂。通过试图证明专制秩序是对宇宙存在的残酷的唯一适当回应,刘的小说戏剧化了施密特关于政治敌人和紧急状态下英雄决定的概念如何为个人的残忍和集体的破坏性战争提供合法性。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
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0
期刊介绍: Widely acknowledged as the leading journal in its field, Novel publishes essays concerned with the novel"s role in engaging and shaping the world. To promote critical discourse on the novel, the journal publishes significant work on fiction and related areas of research and theory. Recent issues on the early American novel, eighteenth-century fiction, and postcolonial modernisms carry on Novel"s long-standing interest in the Anglo-American tradition.
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