Parabolic Defamiliarisation

Parabolic Defamiliarisation names the operation by which a fictional or parabolic "alternative universe" estranges the reader from their habitual ideological coordinates, forcing a confrontation with the very reality those coordinates ordinarily conceal. In the move Rollins performs in the source text, the constructed fictional world is not an escape from the real but its mirror: because the parable operates through displacement and indirection, it bypasses the defensive structures (disavowal, fantasy-framing, ideological habit) that insulate the reader from the truth of their own position. The fictional detour thus functions as a diagnostic instrument — the reader who enters the alternative world exits into an estranged encounter with their actual world.

The concept is theoretically precise in the following sense: it is not mere narrative defamiliarisation in the Shklovskian sense of "making strange for aesthetic effect." Rather, the parabolic move specifically targets the inner/outer distinction operative in faith and ideology. By literalising or displacing a belief into a fictional scenario, it renders legible what can only be shown, not said — that authentic belief is only visible in embodied, subversive action, not in interior confession. The parable thereby collapses the subject's imaginary interiority (where they believe they hold certain convictions) against an exterior theatrical demonstration that reveals the gap between stated belief and lived practice. This is the defamiliarising cut: not aesthetic strangeness, but the exposure of ideology-as-practice beneath the fiction of ideology-as-belief.

Within rollins-peter-the-orthodox-heretic-and-other-impossible-tales-paraclete-press-20, Parabolic Defamiliarisation is the methodological key to the entire collection: it explains why the parables take the form they do — provocative, "impossible," world-inverting — and what they are supposed to accomplish in the reader. The concept is positioned as an extension and theological specification of several canonical Lacanian notions. Most directly, it reactivates the logic of Ideology: the fictional world exposes what Lacanian ideology-theory calls the structural non-knowledge embedded in social practice — the reader "knows" their world but must be shown it from outside before they can register what they know. The parable performs what demystification ordinarily fails to do, precisely because it does not argue but shows, routing around the cynical distance that canonical Ideology analysis identifies as ideology's most resilient mode.

The concept equally engages Fantasy and Fetishistic Disavowal. The "alternative universe" the parable constructs mimics the function of fantasy as a reality-constituting frame — but inverts its effect: rather than suturing the reader into a coherent experiential world that screens the Real, the parabolic universe briefly de-sutures that framing, making the reader's own fantasy-structure momentarily visible as a structure. This is closely adjacent to what the Ethics of Psychoanalysis calls the traversal of fantasy: the reader is, however briefly, exposed to the constructed character of their ideological reality rather than simply inhabiting it. The Act is also implicitly at stake: the collapse of the inner/outer distinction in faith means that belief is only authentic as enacted, a point that resonates with the Lacanian notion that the Act cuts through the web of symbolic justification and makes something real. Parabolic Defamiliarisation is therefore best understood as a poetic-theological instrument for achieving, in narrative form, what Lacanian ethics demands in analytic form: a confrontation with the Real beneath the ideological frame.

The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible TalesPeter Rollins · 2009 (p.9)

By creating a fictional world, we thus come face-to-face with our own world.

The phrase "face-to-face with our own world" is theoretically loaded because it names a reflexive loop — the fictional world (the detour) does not substitute for the real world but returns the subject to it under conditions of forced visibility. The term "our own world" implies that the world was always already there but not seen as such; the fiction does not add knowledge but removes the screen (the fantasy-frame, the ideological non-knowledge) that made the familiar world invisible as an ideological construction.