‘Remaining Men Together’: A Critique of Modern Experience in Palahniuk’s Fight Club
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2019
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Abstract
The binary of the body and the mind is one of the issues that lie at the heart of the Project of Modernity. While laying the grounds for the Modern World, Descartes also intensified the hierarchical gap between the body and the mind by stressing that the mind is the headstone of existence. The denial of the body and its reception as the inferior half of our human faculties went on and on for centuries turning people into split entities who are alienated to their animal beings and who are metaphorically crippled by the overrating of the mind over the body. Palahniuk’s Fight Club is the modern human’s cry for help, in this respect. It is the dark representation of the split personalities created by this binary which are struggling in the grip of the robotic world of consumerism, capitalism and individualism. In this context, fighting is used as a metaphor for life in the middle of a dead world. Only through fighting and pain one can be exactly sure that s/he is alive. In brief, the aim in this chapter is to show how Palahniuk paradoxically uses the concept of pain as a reminder of being alive and manages to make a striking critique of modern experience through this paradox. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.