Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold War Citizen

As a historical continuum within the citizen imagination, the Cold War existed as a set of internalized mechanisms for the imperiling and domination of the subject. In the more extreme fictions staging this anxiety this appears as a fear for one’s internal organs, according to a sacrificial logic threatening innocent citizen ‘insides’: through repressed terror about radiation's genetic damage, paranoid scening of victimization of the unconscious, and fallout hypochondria dramatizing the triangular nature of Cold War geopolitics as inward disease. I will be exploring such anxieties in a series of texts which include Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and its parodies of Sartrean politics, inwardness and the French Cold War; Elizabeth Bowen's 1964 novel The Little Girls and its representation of bunker mentality; J.G. Ballard's 1969 The Atrocity Exhibition and its exploration of victimizing technology; Douglas Oliver's 1973 novel The Harmless Building and its staging of inner organ anxiety and warfare. Theoretically, the chapter will be underpinned by René Girard on scapegoating and mimetic desire, as well as Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ and his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities with its exploration of sacrificial history; these will be used to revise Agamben's Homo Sacer theory slightly (following Anselm Haverkamp) to enable a targeted interpretation of Cold War sacrificial codes.