Abstract

This paper will establish a ‘dialogue’ between the British Fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and the Slovenian philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. This dialogue will demonstrate in three ʻmovements' firstly how Pratchett’s texts seem to stage Žižekian notions of the relations between belief, knowledge and perversion, secondly how they develop and add nuance to Žižek's concept of the pervert-fundamentalist's claim to ʻknowledge' and thirdly how they ʻjoin up' or cohere certain of Žižek's ideas on fundamentalism, perversion, the law and ʻevil'. The dialogue will also be read as indicative of the capacity of secondary, alternative world Fantasy texts to be radical. It is the contention of this paper that Pratchett exemplifies the radical scope of Fantasy literature because he utilizes certain unique aspects of the ‘Fantasy armoury’, tools available to Fantasy but unavailable to texts that may be thought of as operating under the confines of ʻrealism', in order to engage in a Foucauldian disturbance of the reader’s equilibrium