Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power

The Chronotope of the Abject in The Binding of Isaac

Abstract

This article argues that a spatiotemporal approach to abjection in video games helps scholars understand how confronting the abject in gameplay maps onto biopolitical conditions of living and gaming under sovereign state power. By means of a slow reading of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this essay offers the chronotope of the abject as a flexible, interpretive tool to account for game narrative, mechanics, and iconography that map onto out-of-game lived realities. Drawing upon Kristeva’s psychoanalysis and Agamben’s philosophy of politics, I adapt Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold to the mutable video game medium in order to take up the threshold concepts of the abject, life/death, responsibility/ethics, and reading/writing presented in the game. Through the chronotope, I also reconsider this game’s critical response and relation to a Christian cosmology. Ultimately, the chronotope opens up a threshold space through which more just and equitable chronotopic relations might emerge.