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The horrors of capitalism in Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991)
- Source: Horror Studies, Volume 14, Issue 1, Apr 2023, p. 101 - 118
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- 29 Nov 2021
- 16 Nov 2022
- 24 May 2023
Abstract
Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991) is a play replete with violence, cruelty, murder and gore. While many critics view the playwright’s horror-inflected plays as reflective of an Artaudian philosophy that attempts to uncover the essential human ‘truth’ underlying societal ills, I view The Law of Remains as an exercise in dialectical horror. That is, a play that harnesses the grammar of gore and excess to critique capitalism’s disempowering and rapacious qualities while highlighting how consciousness of such qualities could galvanize positive opposition to oppression. In this article, I examine some of the play’s key moments of horror through a Marxist lens to uncover an anti-capitalist structure of feeling that lay in stark opposition to dominant neo-liberal forces in the early 1990s.