ABSTRACT
Nordic noir is a cultural juggernaut. Before the Viking conquest of our television schedules, Scandinavian crime-fiction authors like Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbo, Liza Marklund, and most famously, Stieg Larsson, had paved the way by colonizing bestseller lists the world over. The ghosts of signification are important in ultra-realism, a criminological approach that uncovers the deep-rooted human drives and actions that constitute and reproduce the social order. Influenced by transcendental materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, ultra-realism challenges the fundamental domain assumptions of both right-realist and left-liberal criminology: both these positions, ultra-realists argue, overstate the autonomy and efficacy of individual agency and ignore the role of the unconscious in shaping subjectivity. Inarticulate and articulate expressions of discontent emanating from the old heartlands but not expressed in approved politico-cultural terms are too often dismissed as regressive or dangerously populist.
