Enjoying God's Death:The Passion of the Christand the Practices of an Evangelical Public

Abstract

Publics are not simply a product of common attention to texts, but are also animated by an economy of tropes and affects that relies on processes of metonymic connection, metaphorical condensation, and affective investment. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theory of enjoyment and his treatments of metaphor and metonymy as rhetorical forms, this essay details the circulation of tropes, affects, and practices of seeing constituting an evangelical public around Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ with special attention to the ways that the film operates as one node in an affective economy that articulates tropes of victimhood and intimacy within the public practices of evangelicalism. More broadly, this essay suggests that reading publics through the lens of an economy of trope and affective investment provides significant insight into the production and durability of public identity commitments.

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