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The buffyverse soteriology
youth's garden of earthly delights
pp. 133-149
Abstract
H ieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1504, central panel, Figure 8.1) presents a vision of Hell—a place where the psyche suffers— characterized by excesses of bodily addictions, jouissance, and the drives. Metaphorically, it already distances us from the "horrors and delights' of the virtual Real, a place where the division of human beings and nature has yet to be formed, D+G's immanent plane of flows and intensities; nonstratified, unformed intense matter, where both the animate and inanimate, the artificial and the natural come together. This unformed and fluid plane of nature (or BwO) is simply a function of varying its speed and slowness, movement and rest, and intensities within a single physical system. Both the Imaginary and Symbolic psychic orders, as "abstract machines of stratification" (to continue to use D+G's language), protect us from its worst manifestations. As Bosch's paradoxical title suggests, the delights and horrors that emerge from it, seemingly through autopoietic processes, are intimately enfolded within one another: Heaven and Hell are not dichotomies; rather, they are braided together in complicitous and complex ways, like demand and desire, as intertwining toruses (doughnuts). Bosch's painting seems to be a perfect metaphor for the "Hellmouth," the portal through which the demonic forces gain entry to Buffy's Sunnydale.
Publication details
Published in:
Jagodzinski Jan (2008) Television and youth culture: televised paranoia. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pages: 133-149
Full citation:
Jagodzinski Jan (2008) The buffyverse soteriology: youth's garden of earthly delights, In: Television and youth culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 133–149.