In/Security and Discursive Appropriation in Chuck Palahniuk’s "Fight Club"

Abstract

Chuck Palahniuk’s "Fight club" (1996) is a novel about security and vulnerability both on the personal and the political sphere, where the boundary between the two is considered to be very thin, and the vulnerability is seen as a consequence of a world-spread crisis of responsibility. In the essay, the author considers "Fight Club"’s construction of a fictional world grounded on a generalised sense of shared vulnerability, and explores how this sense results in a problematic re-appropriation of violence and the creation of a liminal community that challenges the mainstream globalised American community from the inside. The analysis then moves on to explore the ‘sociology of knowledge’ behind the construction of "Fight Club"’s oppositional community, reflected in the novel’s narrative strategies and structure, and speculates on degrees of responsibility corresponding to various levels of embeddedness and awareness on the part of the members of the group. By constructing fight club as a liminal community, the novel offers a possibility to break the cycle of appropriation, turning a scenario of vulnerability into a reflection on the political constituencies that endorse protection for certain subjects and exclude others from it.