Before exploring how literary reading can help people in despair decide to stay alive, in this chapter, I am going to review contemporary theories of suicidal behaviour, drawing mainly on ideas from social psychology and cultural anthropology. I believe this will be helpful, initially, in enabling better understanding of how suicidal ideas are presented in literary texts. And then, later in the book, I will suggest ways in which literary reading can usefully inform, modify and extend these theories.

Anomie and Alienation

Sociological perspectives probably start with Emile Durkheim's Suicide, published in Paris in 1897. Durkheim took the view, radical in his day, that suicide was not the result of deep moral failure, nor simply an individual's response to difficult life circumstances. Instead, it should be understood as a social fact, that is to say something that is external to, and imposed upon, individual actors. He drew attention to the effects of imbalance between social regulation and social integration. Social regulation is understood as the normative or moral demands placed on the individual that come with membership in a group, while social integration refers to the extent of social relations binding a person or a group to others, such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group. On this basis he proposed four different types of suicide.

Egotistic suicide reflects a sense of not belonging, of having no stake in a community and results from a lack of social integration.

Durkheim argued that detachment, or what he called ‘excessive individuation’, meant people had little social support or guidance. He found that suicide was more common amongst unmarried men, who had few social connections.

In this chapter I selectively and briefly discuss aspects of the critical, philosophical and psychological traditions relating in particular to the epistemic experiences of the sublime and epiphany and some other related feelings.

The Sublime

The experience of the sublime involves both an epistemic feeling and an arousal. This is an epistemic feeling of coming to know something significant, which is often ineffable. Writing in 1804, Thomas Moore brings out the ineffability of the sublime when he says about Niagara Falls, ‘[i]t is impossible by pen or pencil to convey even a faint idea of their magnificence […] We must have new combinations of language to describe the Fall of Niagara’ (Dowden 1964: 77).

The experience of the sublime is characteristically triggered by the perception of something extreme, such as something extremely large or deep, old, fast or slow. Kant cites as triggers, ‘the broad ocean agitated by storms’ (1952: 92), ‘shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder, with their pyramids of ice’ (1952: 104) or ‘deep ravines’ (1952: 121). Addison says that‘[o]ur imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them’ (Spectator no.412, in Monk 1960: 57). Why might extreme objects be a trigger of a strong experience? One possibility is that the extremely large object is experienced as looming, and hence a threat to be feared like a predator, and so a source of the fight-flight-freeze arousals. Extreme objects might also be perceived as tokens that are very discrepant relative to their types, by virtue of their size. But it is alternatively possible that very large tokens might be seen as too close to their type, as an effect of the magnified scale; the component features that define the type are more emphasized in very large objects, and this perhaps makes the very large token uncannily close to the type. This can be seen for example in Marc Quinn's supersized but otherwise hyperrealistic sculptures. The idea that an extreme token is discrepant relative to type applies also to the very small, which can produce the sublime even though there is no looming effect that might provoke fear.

In recent decades, it has seemed as though queer people and women's rights advocates were making progress in the culture war over the family. From 2001 to 2021, 31 countries legalized marriage for same-sex couples. Majorities in the United States and European Union countries came to support same-sex marriage and other fundamental rights for LGBTQ families. Although some variation remains, divorce is now relatively easy to attain in most Western nations around the world. Parentage and custody rights for same-sex couples are increasingly the norm in Western democracies.

Yet, despite this growing support for pluralistic family forms, divisions remain, and, in many countries, legal victories for religious conservatives threaten to scale back progress for women and sexual minorities. For example, in 2018, the United States Supreme Court decided Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in favor of a baker who refused service to a same-sex couple because of the baker's religious beliefs. In the past seven years, three politically motivated lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate on religious and moral grounds landed in the Supreme Court. In 2021, the Court sided with a Catholic adoption agency that refused to work with LGBTQ couples. Women's and girls’ right to terminate a pregnancy, even before viability and even in cases of rape or incest, is in peril, with the Supreme Court deciding to sit by and watch for months as Texas, the country's second-largest state, passed a law criminalizing abortion and effectively rendering Roe v. Wade a dead letter. With a new supermajority on the Supreme Court since 2020, social conservatives in the United States have pressed forward with a sweeping set of religious exemptions from public services and nondiscrimination laws that threaten to turn respect for group differences into a license to discriminate. And these recent attacks go well beyond the conservatives’ bread and butter issues of abortion and “the family”—as evidenced by pandemic-era religious freedom challenges to even basic public health measures such as mask mandates, immunizations, and restrictions on large gatherings. That is, despite increased acceptance of pluralistic family forms, it seems that the United States is suddenly awash in a tide of religiosity.

How can queer activism contribute to gaining recognition and material support for a plurality of nonnormative relationships and families, including Consensual Nonmonogamies (CNMs) and polyamories? What is the significance of coalition work in queer legal politics around relational rights? What kind of coalitions may be conducive to intersectional queer politics for social justice and what kind of coalitions may obstruct such a goal? In this chapter, I engage in a series of interrelated reflections on queer politics, religion, and the ethics of coalition work around the legal recognition of relationships not matching the normative pattern of heterosexual dyadic organization. Its main focus is on the potential of coalitions between queer and religious groups.

The chapter argues that coalitional practice forms a key element of queer politics and that coalitions between queer and religious groups are in principle welcome. I further argue that queer and religious groups do not form mutually exclusive populations and that the boundaries between the secular and religion appear to be much fuzzier than usually acknowledged if we carefully examine the history of core political concepts, including those commonly structuring queer politics. Inasmuch as CNM is concerned, the observation that both secular and new-age polyamory and conventional religious polygamy face legal discrimination in many jurisdictions provides valid reasons for considering coordinated responses. Apart from a shared interest in relationship recognition beyond dyadic relational forms, the racist denigration of indigenous CNMs or Muslim polygamy in white settler societies and Western (majoritarian Christian) countries invites coalitions around anti-racism as an integral part of intersectional queer social justice politics. At the same time, I suggest that fruitful coalition work is best founded on a set of shared values, which renders queer coalition work with groups that are overtly hostile toward LGBTQI+ people inherently problematic. Foregrounding the need to carefully consider the ethical grounds for coalitional practice, the chapter rejects proposals that queer agendas could be advanced through strategic coalitions with conservative religious groups whose major motivation for action is the preservation of civil marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Queer politics strives for an ethics of inclusivity and entails the affirmation of nonnormative ways of life.

This book elaborates on a counterintuitive idea. Religious conservativism in family law could have more in common with queer politics than liberal politics, with queer designating “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant [as t]here is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers” (Halperin 1995, 62). I focus on a specific illustration of this idea, by looking at certain nonmarital regimes introduced in the West from the end of the nineties with the goal of obstructing marriage equality.

Laws open to friends or relatives were enacted by same-sex marriage opponents in, for instance, Alberta, Vermont, Hawai’i, Victoria, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Similar laws have been defined “[t]he backlash version of the embracing of domestic partnerships” (Boyd and Young 2003, 768). The mobilization of the conservative groups behind them was not animated by a desire to promote plural family values and recognize a larger set of families. The idea was to grant legal recognition to same-sex couples while at the same time preserving traditional marriage, as well as diluting the symbolic value of same-sex couple recognition into a larger basket of desexualized relationships. Yet, such reforms virtually aligned with a queer ambition to debunk stereotypes around family. Amongst these stereotypes is the sexual and romantic nature of the union, challenged by the recognition of committed unions of adult friends and relatives (nonconjugal couples).

The recognition of nonconjugal families is a worthwhile project from the perspective of queer politics. There is a fascinating body of literature on the much-needed shift in law's focus from sex to care. By reducing law's attachment to sexual relationships, these theories suggest, law could finally also recognize nonconjugal families where important caretaking work occurs. In Canada, the debate was sparked by the seminal work of the Law Commission of Canada, an independent federal law reform agency advising the government to shift law's focus on nonconjugal couples already in 2001 (Law Commission of Canada 2001, 37; see also Cossman and Ryder 2001). The United States and the United Kingdom have also been a wellspring of seminal reflections in this area.

By the seventeenth century, the fame of R. Joseph Karo was already well-established. When people referred to his fundamental double codes of law, and to his responsa, they did not refer to him in the customary manner in the rabbinical milieu, as Rabbi or Chakham (literally “sage,” a common title for rabbis in the Sephardi tradition). Karo bore the title Maran (“our Master” in Aramaic), sometimes without even adding his surname “Karo.”

In the early modern world, and in the geographical location where R. Karo lived, on the seam between Catholic Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Jewish Mediterranean Diaspora, titles mattered a lot. They distinguished their bearer from other members of his collective (such as a professional guild); they endowed a specific position within a hierarchy; they marked the boundaries between various ethnic and religious collectivities; and they delineated a professional identity. They shaped self-perceptions and inspired honor and respect from others. This was equally true regarding the Islamic and Catholic majority societies and the Jewish minority living among them. Jewish community leaders bore certain titles and insisted on a suitable response from others. The same was true in relation to the rabbinical milieu in regard to honorary and professional titles, continuing a centuries-long tradition. However, “Maran” was a unique title of Joseph Karo, related to no other rabbinical, Talmudic, or post-Talmudic persona. The circumstances leading to its use and its semantic and cultural affiliations are the main themes of this chapter.

Jewish Titles

As the rabbinical tradition of learning was progressively institutionalized in schools (the Yeshiva or Beit Midrash) during late antiquity in the Holy Land, and further east in Babylonia under Sassanian and later Islamic rule, Jewish tradition witnessed an impressive growth of various titles.

If you have already read Anna Karenina, this is probably the passage that lodged most powerfully in your memory. And even if you have not yet had the pleasure of Tolstoy's masterpiece, you may well have witnessed this unforgettable scene on film or television, whether performed by Helen McCrory, Keira Knightley, Sophie Marceau, Nicola Pagett, Tatiana Samoilova or Vivien Leigh, or – first, and for me by far the best – the 1935 interpretation by the incomparable Greta Garbo.

The four volumes or sections comprising Beit Yosef, undoubtedly one of the fundamental books in the history of the Halakhah, were printed between 1550 and 1559. Its importance was demonstrated by the enthusiastic welcome the work received shortly after its publication and by its impact in the long run. For three centuries, the long code of law attracted important commentaries by the leading Talmudic scholars around the Mediterranean Basin and in Eastern and Central Europe (mainly in Poland); later, it even inspired the composition of commentaries on previous codes authored by Maimonides (Mishneh Torah) and R. Jacob ben Ha-Rosh (Ha-Turim or Arbaʽa Turim). The most impressive fact of all, however, is that along with the glosses of the contemporary Polish rabbi Moses Isserles on the short version of this magnum opus—the Shulchan ʽArukh—Karo's work has not to the present day been succeeded by any further code of law. The importance of both these codifications was acknowledged by their composer R. Joseph Karo in fascinating preambles, declaring that Jewish tradition is constituted through legality and halakhic instruction rather than through any other component of Jewish heritage. This was a watershed moment in the history of Jewish culture and religion, and one that prepared ground for the later crystallization of Orthodox Judaism and the contemporary ultra-Orthodox worldview and community life. Law and Halakhah were interconnected with Jewish mystic tradition—Kabbalah—and with new theological conceptions. Together these three elements provided the early modern rabbinical elite with the essential tools to reform and revitalize Jewish tradition.

What was the starting point for the composition of Beit Yosef, and later the Shulchan ʽArukh, which turned R. Karo into a Talmudic celebrity? How far back should we go in order to understand what stood behind these magna opera? The first time axis is certainly the biographical trajectory of the composer himself, and especially the scholarly path that he followed as a member of a rabbinical family and the scholarly milieu. This extremely small elite assigned the most talented among the young generation to become a Talmudic scholar (talmid chakham), rabbi, judge, or even a halakhic arbiter (poseq), at the peak of the rabbinical hierarchy. Little is known of the early phases of Karo's initiation into rabbinical scholarship, except for the fact that his uncle R. Isaac Karo was his first and probably most significant master.

Images, economies—one so present but elusive at the point of exchange, the other so concrete at that point but so elusive in its circulations. In the first part of this book, I surveyed several ways in which the two terms had been thought together. With Indigenous management of sacred and secular “designs” as a control case, we traced a trajectory within Western thought that took these terms to be linked in fundamental senses when explanations of world being were required. Part II profiled contention within contemporary cultures, the politics of the iconosphere, the clash of images as different world pictures competed to be seen, to become as visible as others, more visible than them, with social being at stake. Our subject has been the current warring between image regimes, where they came from, and what critical theory offers to our efforts to understand them.

Does “iconomy” acutely name the plane upon which these phenomena are operating, and pick out their distinctive features in ways that we need to know now? Or does use of the concept blur distinctions that must be made—not least those between imagery and economies—if our current situation, and the pasts that shaped it, are to be fully and clearly grasped?

As we have seen throughout these chapters, to think in iconomic terms does both things—at times one, at other times the other, often at once, in rarely predictable ways. Given what we know about the nature of images and economies, this should be no surprise. Nevertheless, we have also seen that pairing the concepts “image” and “economy” has brought into view several aspects of both that usually remain invisible or implicit. Viewing them politically focuses on real-world relevance. Iconomics becomes iconopolitics.

Before attempting some provisional conclusions, and proposing some possible principles for iconomic thinking, some basic terms require revisiting.

By “image” I mean material images of all kinds, from single pictures through moving images, virtual imagery, and self-images to public personae, as well as mental images of many kinds, from dream imagery to social imaginaries. In none of these contexts does an image exist by itself. It exists in something which carries it and in the regard of someone or something that sees it.

Showrunners, Shot Callers and Flying Typewriters

In April 1963, television producer Joyce Belfrage ended her four-year term at the ABC with a mighty crash. Having heard that Assistant General Manager Clem Semmler and the Television Producer's Assessment Committee were demoting her for a second time, she had had enough. Fuelled with rage for the unjust treatment she felt she had received at the hands of ‘pedantic’, ‘po-faced’ bureaucrats, Joyce left her Forbes Street office to drown her sorrows and think on her dilemma. She was torn between her loyalty to the organization's public service ideals and a growing vexation with the compromised production cultures that arose during the ABC's difficult transition to television. Returning to her office, Joyce stalked past her secretary and loudly declared she was finally ‘fed up’. Spotting the defective typewriter she had long been asking to have replaced, her frustrations spilled over. Joyce pulled down the cumbersome machine and heaved it out the window. Gloriously smashing onto the laneway below, it was a bitter reminder of her unrequited appeals for better conditions and the progressive diminution of her authority. In a final act of defiance, she took out her new crimson lipstick and scrawled a large, expletive-laden farewell to the ABC on the wall. ‘There, that looks better now’, she declared, and began to pack her things.

Not long after Joyce's rebellious departure, another female television producer was disrupting the status quo at the ABC. In 1963, Therése Denny returned from a long sojourn at the BBC. A highly regarded television producer, her agenda was to produce a series of documentary critiques of Australian society and culture. As one of the few producers invited to join the exclusive exchange programme between the two broadcasters, Therése Denny was a very different person from the inexperienced young woman who left the ABC in 1949, exasperated by the constant rejection of her requests to produce. Returning forewarned and forearmed, Therése used her BBC status ‘to sustain her authority within a production workplace that she knew to be insular, insecure and resistant to women in authority’. The conspicuous combination of her expertise and her gender proved troubling for many in the ABC establishment and many programmers were concerned about Therése's disruptive confidence.

Kay Kinane

Tall and imposing with a calm, sonorous voice, Kay Kinane was unafraid to roll up her sleeves and leap into the middle of the action, whether directing live broadcasts, inspecting migrant camps in post-war Germany or riding a motorbike in the Outback. In 1944, she was recognized for her innovative approach to producing educational content and became the first woman to lead an ABC state department as a Supervisor of Schools Broadcasting. Four years later she was promoted again, this time to a national position as Federal Script Editor (Education). Kay Kinane produced hundreds of radio projects in the first phase of her broadcasting career, including numerous adult education programmes, radio for migrants and scores of educational shows for children, such as the celebrated narrative series, The Days of Good Queen Bess (1948) and the 12-part environmental history The World We Live In (1955). In 1956, after helping set up the ABC's television training school, Kay agreed to be the first showrunner of Woman's World where she and host Mary Rossi pushed the boundaries of what were determined to be ‘women's interests’ on television. Woman's World addressed a diverse range of issues; in one week the show might celebrate the wonders of the classical world, present comedy performances and give book reviews, and in another demonstrate basic carpentry for housewives, discuss the plight of single mothers and teach parents how to diagnose dyslexia.

Kay Kinane eventually returned to educational broadcasting and attained one female-first role after another. She played a key part in the formation of national educational broadcast policy and practice. She was promoted to Assistant Director of the national department in 1964, and was subsequently elevated to the rank of Federal Supervisor of Young People's Programmes in 1968.

How the Strong Experience Is Triggered

A strong experience involves a sudden experience characterized by a strong feeling. One kind of strong feeling is an epistemic feeling of coming to know something highly significant, though what is known may be ineffable. The other kind of strong feeling is a sudden phasic arousal such as a chill or tears or some other bodily feeling that can otherwise be associated with emotion. The strong experience can involve both of these feelings, but sometimes just one is felt. In this book I have put strong experiences into three groups. One is the ‘thrill’ which is often just the arousal. The second is the ‘sublime’ which is often both the epistemic feeling and the arousal. The third is the ‘epiphany’ which is often just the epistemic feeling. Neither the strong experience in itself nor these three subtypes are natural kinds of experience. Rather, they are a way of grouping certain experiences which might be related, with the goal of understanding why they arise.

I have suggested that strong experiences all start as surprise. This explains why they are sudden and brief, like surprise. It also explains why they can be triggered, like surprise, and by triggers which are surprising. It explains why they involve an epistemic feeling, because surprise is basically an epistemic event of coming to know something not previously known. Why the feeling of significance arises is discussed in Chapter 3, as is the feeling of ineffability. And strong experiences involve arousal because surprise involves arousal, as discussed in Chapter 4. There are various ways in which surprise can arise, but in this book I focus on the way by which ‘if a discrepancy between schema and input occurs, surprise is elicited’ (Meyer et al. 1991: 296). I have proposed two ways in which a discrepancy might generate a strong experience. The first is when the perception of events or objects or characters, whether directly perceived or represented, is discrepant relative to a schema. Expectation plays an important role, by making schemata available which are then checked against the perceptions. Narratives and the sequential aspects of texts often depend on expectation to play this role in enabling schematic discrepancy.

In their introduction to this volume, Anthony Enns and Bernhard Metz seek to show how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, and typography, reflect or even determine their cultural status. Recent experimental research seems to confirm this hypothesis by showing that book covers play an important role in the first evaluation of a text. As the history of the literary field shows, the prestige of books is the product of the tension between two competing capitals: symbolic and economic capital. Their relation is inversely proportional, as symbolic capital increases the more economic capital decreases, and vice versa. When books are heavily promoted and consequently popular, for example, they are often perceived as trivial, whereas rare and complex books are more often perceived as serious and therefore prestigious. If, as the editors of the present volume seem to propose, the prestige of books changes depending on variations in book production, then the digital era should have a huge impact on this value.

The rise of the internet is only one aspect of the digital revolution—a technological transformation that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the publishing industry. The transformation that has affected the publishing industry at every level of the value chain is reflected by the growth of online retailers like Amazon as well as the much-publicized debates about digital books among literary critics. As Adriaan van der Weel puts it, thanks to digitality we are experiencing the third reading revolution of humanity, which is changing the “Order of the Book” that formed the basis of Western culture. Van der Weel uses Walter Benjamin's concept of “aura” to describe the authority of the print book and the loss of the “aura” to describe the fate of the book in the digital age. This loss is precisely a loss of prestige, which is directly linked to the materiality of books. The digital text threatens the existence of the print book in several ways. First of all, digital copies of a text cannot be distinguished from the original. Secondly, in a digital world, a literary text always runs the risk of “digital obsolescence” (i.e., the deterioration of its materiality).

We have already seen—in chapter 2—the first truly contemporary theorization of the central role of images in a political economy: Marie-José Mondzian's account of Byzantine iconoclasm, outlined in an essay of 1989 and set out fully in her book Image, Icon, Economy; The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (1996). There, she exercised a characteristic restraint in hinting at but not coining the neologism “iconomy” as the general term for her subject. Writing during the first Gulf War, however, she does not refrain from asserting the current relevance of her project, not only in her subtitle but also in statements such as this: “From the specific standpoint of provoking belief or obtaining obedience, there is no great difference between submitting to a church council or to CNN.”

In 1992, Jean-Joseph Goux spoke of “a new ‘iconomy’” to highlight the extraordinary financial values attaching to works of art in the contemporary art market. In the same year, a more comprehensive contemporary theorization, entirely immersed in current problematics, was attempted. Arizona University graduate student Dion Dennis embarked on a project entitled The Subject Under the Sign of the Market: Steps Toward a Political Iconomy. In a 1993 essay, he defined it as follows: