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This book explores the issue of a collective representation of Ireland after the sudden death of the 'Celtic Tiger' and introduces the aesthetic idea that runs throughout. The focus is on the idea articulated by W. B. Yeats in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'. The book also explores the symbolic order and imaginative structure, the meanings and values associated with house and home, the haunted houses of Ireland's 'ghost estates' and the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household. It examines the sophisticated financial instruments derived from mortgage-backed securities that were a lynchpin of global financialization and the epicentre of the crash, the question of the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household of Europe. A story about fundamental values and principles of fairness and justice is discussed, in particular, the contemporary conflict that reiterates the ancient Irish mythic story of the Tain. The book suggests correspondences between Plato's Republic and the Irish republic in the deformations and devolution of democracy into tyranny. It traces a red thread from the predicament of the ancient Athenians to contemporary Ireland in terms of the need to govern pleonexia, appetites without limits. The political and economic policies and practices of Irish development, the designation of Ireland's 'tax free zones', are also discussed. Finally, the ideal type of person who has been emerging under the auspices of the neoliberal revolution is imagined.
Christian civilisation. The fate of civilisation and ‘The Second Coming’ Of course, the war took a great toll on this civilisation and resulted in a fundamental rethinking of the very idea of ‘civilisation’ itself. If the nineteenth century had been preoccupied with the notion of progress in technological, biological, and many other senses, the generation that
corpses, found in various states of amputation. A monster-maker, Talisac has managed to fashion himself an external, semi-translucent womb, out of which grows the Mongroid. The latter is an aberration of creation resembling a gigantic mouth, a crab homunculus made of his DNA, and who is referred to as the ‘infant of the Second Coming’. 26 But if these designs do not sound dark
), recurrence is represented in ‘The Second Coming’ by the figure of the spiral gyre: recurring cycles of history marked by moments of dissolution of order, liminality and the imposition of a new order. Modernity sees the acceleration, intensification and apotheosis of cycles of historical recurrence. ‘What rough beast’, Yeats asks, emerges from this civilization at the moment of its apotheosis and simultaneous decadence (Yeats 1920a, pp. 10–11)? ‘We The voyage of Ulysses in Homer is re lived in the mundane everyday world of his modern hero Leopold Bloom, and in Finnegans
One hundred years ago, in the shadow of World War I and the Irish War of Independence, W. B. Yeats wrote his famous poem “The Second Coming.” In this poem, he deploys a variety of natural, biblical, and even archaeological metaphors and images to emphasize the archetypal interwar period feeling that the world was coming undone; that a cusp had been reached; that the horrors just visited had unleashed something new, dynamic, and unquestionably threatening. Among the unformed threats that Yeats feared were slouching towards Bethlehem, we must include the weapons
of truth-telling that resounds through Irish writers from Yeats to Friel. In MacNeice’s claim that ‘to attempt scientific truthfulness would be – paradoxically – dishonest’ we hear echoes of Yeats’s apparently ambiguous statement in ‘The Second Coming’ – ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’15 – with its combined fear of faithlessness and insincerity. Meanwhile MacNeice’s comment ‘In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment’ anticipates the kinds of qualifications Friel used to excuse his
represented in ‘The Second Coming’ by the figure of the spiral gyre: recurring cycles of history marked by moments of dissolution of order, liminality and the imposition of a new order. Modernity sees the acceleration, intensification and apotheosis of cycles of historical recurrence. What rough beast, Yeats asks, emerges from this civilization at the moment of its apotheosis and simultaneous decadence, when things fall apart? ‘We are legion’ is the demon’s answer. The rough beast has many countenances: ‘cold, egotistical calculation; the conduct of business without regard
argued, rectilinear temporality was superseded: ‘the past and future were experienced in the present’.35 For Friends, the present was folded into the past of the primitive church, as they lived the experience of the emerging New Testament church, but they were simultaneously internalising and living the future, through the second coming of Christ within each believer. The belief that the second coming of Christ (still in the historical future for other radicals such as Fifth Monarchists and Baptists) was taking place in the present, as it had done in the time of the
the passing of the Toleration Act in May 1689. All Trinitarian Protestants were henceforth granted the right to worship in public, thereby appeasing tensions between Anglicans and nonconformists, while further marginalising religious radicalism (see Chapter 5).7 Still, visionaries, mystics and pseudo-messiahs continued to announce the Second Coming throughout the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution even prompted a new millenarian impetus that would last into the eighteenth-century.8 Joseph Mede’s Clavis apocalyptica (1627) was the landmark of seventeenth
subjects were formed, are erased, there is a generalized condition of liminality and anomie. Dufour echoes Yeats’s opening line of ‘The Second Coming’, ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer’, which suggests ‘man’s separation from every ideal of himself that has enabled him to control his life . . . his break with every traditional tie’ (Ellmann, 1964: 259). The breaking of frames, being no longer interpellated by the name of the Father, releases centrifugal pleonexic appetites – greed, ambition and hubris. This can give the appearance of vitality and vigorous growth as