The Whole of Nothing

Abstract

The essence of the previous chapters is about the challenges and difficulties in both the administration of criminal justice, and what crimes oblige characters to experience and how they respond. Because criminal justice, as both protection and enforcement, is so vulnerable, inconsistent and uncertain, it is the work of Julia Kristeva on abjection, with its emphasis on fluidity, boundary violation and precarity that serves to enhance my argument further. McDonagh emphasises the significance of violated bodies, deploys language practices that give expression to the crude and almost unsayable, dramatizes failed suicides in incongruous ways, and uses the symbolism associated with fire and burning. Notions of abject justice are conflated with abject laughter. Consequently, McDonagh's interrogations of criminality and corruption stress the absolute centrality of justice to contemporary life.