“Outside Christ”: Dostoevsky’s Joy
“Outside Christ”: Dostoevsky’s Joy
This essay considers non-diegetic representations of joy and suffering in The Idiot and Demons—fragmentary interludes that have a contrapuntal relation to the constraints of narrative, character, content, and duration. In the language of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the fragment is a “sub-work” or “superwork,” “an essential incompletion” that is also a “totality.” In distinction to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, the representations of suffering and joy considered in the essay are not based on an exchange economy in which “happiness is bought by suffering.” Joy is a “here eternal,” without recourse to a redemptive theology.
Keywords: non-diegetic, joy, suffering, The Idiot, Demons, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, fragment
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