`The first and only book to explore, at once, the field of my work and its limits, with both the intimacy and distance required: doubling and shadowing. It gives me great pleasure to find something that, beyond commentary, sees what I see and at the same time what I am unable to see' - Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard is a controversial figure. His work tends to fascinate and infuriate readers in equal numbers. Yet there is no doubting his importance to the (...) key debates in culture and theory of the last ten years. A prolific author, readers sometimes find it difficult to tease out the consistencies in Baudrillard's arguments. This book seeks to redress the balance. It aims to go beyond his writings on consumer objects, the Gulf War and America, to identify the fundamental logic that underpins his writings. It does this through a series of close readings of his main texts, paying particular attention to the form and internal coherence of his arguments. The book contends that, just as Baudrillard himself grapples with the problems of how to criticize self-defining systems, so we cannot simply hold Baudrillard up against external standards but must seek to judge him on his own terms. Jean Baudrillard: A Defence of the Real will be an indispensable text for all those interested in social theory who want a general introduction to Baudrillard's work. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is the most popular and discussed philosopher in the world today. His prolific writings – across philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, film, music and religion – always engage and provoke. The power of his ideas, the breadth of his references, his capacity for playfulness and confrontation, his willingness to change his mind and his refusal fundamentally to alter his argument – all have worked to build an extraordinary international readership as well as to elicit much critical reaction. (...) _The Žižek Dictionary _brings together leading Žižek commentators from across the world to present a companion and guide to Žižekian thought. Each of the 60 short essays examines a key term and, crucially, explores its development across Žižek’s work and how it fits in with other concepts and concerns. The dictionary will prove invaluable both to readers coming to Žižek for the first time and to those already embarked on the Žižekian journey. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is the most popular and discussed philosopher in the world today. His prolific writings – across philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, film, music and religion – always engage and provoke. The power of his ideas, the breadth of his references, his capacity for playfulness and confrontation, his willingness to change his mind and his refusal fundamentally to alter his argument – all have worked to build an extraordinary international readership as well as to elicit much critical reaction. (...) _The Žižek Dictionary _brings together leading Žižek commentators from across the world to present a companion and guide to Žižekian thought. Each of the 60 short essays examines a key term and, crucially, explores its development across Žižek’s work and how it fits in with other concepts and concerns. The dictionary will prove invaluable both to readers coming to Žižek for the first time and to those already embarked on the Žižekian journey. (shrink)

Daniel Herwitz 'The Defence of Extreme Realities' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 45, November 2002.

‘On the “Subject” of Žižek’ is a three-part review essay looking at two recent texts on Žižek’s political interventions: Sean Homer’s Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics, which takes up Žižek’s writings on the Balkan Wars, and Adam’s Kotsko’s series of web posts on Žižek on the refugee “crisis” in Europe. As well, it examines Zizek’s 2016 book on Islamic terrorism and the same “crisis”, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Through a close reading of (...) Žižek’s text, the review asks what is the proper philosophical response to these contemporary events. It proposes that critics of Žižek’s intellectual interventions fail properly to grasp his Hegelian method, which at once is to propose solutions and to think the limits and conditions of possibility of such solutions. It ultimately suggests that such solutions are their own failure, which are intended to lead to a better thinking of our situation – a thinking, consistent with Žižek’s Hegelian method, that could not have been arrived directly, but only through and as the failure of previous solutions. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, Rosalind Krauss, one of the principal theorists of post-modernism in the arts, began using the term "post-medium" in her work. It was a nod to the American "ordinary language" philosopher Stanley Cavell, who had been thinking through a concept of medium in art for 30 years. Today with the decline of post-modernism, Stanley Cavell has emerged as one of the most important figures for thinking again about the visual arts, film and theatre. Stanley Cavell and the (...) Arts looks at Cavell's extensive writings on a wide variety of artforms and at a number of writers (Michael Fried, William Rothman) influenced by his work. Over a 50-year career, Cavell wrote about visual art, photography, classical music, Shakespeare, the plays of Samuel Beckett and perhaps most notably Hollywood cinema. Stanley Cavell and the Arts offers an overview of Cavell's writings on the arts, situating them within his wider philosophical practice, analysing in detail his treatment of particular art forms and looking at the work of those he has deeply shaped. (shrink)

This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of 'theory'. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunter's project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and 'empirical' history.

Of course, music performance has a long “artisanal” history. After all, the training of musicians to perform has been the mainstay of academies and conservatoria for centuries. But the discipline of music performance as part of an academic musicology is a much more recent invention. We argue that it arises some time in the 1960s, when scholars could begin to write comparative histories of performance and think difference choices as to performance style. Against the now sterile authentic/non-authentic, modern/post-modern debates that (...) characterise contemporary music studies, we propose that the various approaches might be classified according to the three Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. We put forward a certain “Real” at stake in performance, although it could never be the basis of any practice, musical manifesto or even properly belong to a history of music performance. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek is the most popular and discussed philosopher in the world today. His prolific writings - across philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, film, music and religion - always engage and provoke. The power of his ideas, the breadth of his references, his capacity for playfulness and confrontation, his willingness to change his mind and his refusal fundamentally to alter his argument - all have worked to build an extraordinary international readership as well as to elicit much critical reaction. (...) The Zizek Dictionary brings together leading Zizek commentators from across the world to present a companion and guide to Zizekian thought. Each of the 60 short essays examines a key term and, crucially, explores its development across Zizek's work and how it fits in with other concepts and concerns. The dictionary will prove invaluable both to readers coming to Zizek for the first time and to those already embarked on the Äi§ekian journey. (shrink)

This article examines William Rothman’s recent essay on Vertigo , ‘Scottie’s Dream, Judy’s Plan, Madeleine’s Revenge’, and particularly his suggestion that in a crucial scene towards the end of the film the character Judy deliberately puts on jewellery in order that Scottie becomes aware that she was the actress who played Madeleine. We look at why Rothman was previously unable to see this in the film, why Judy is unable directly to tell Scottie and why for Rothman a deep truth (...) of the film is this inability of Judy to tell Scottie. In order to address these issues, this article looks at art historian Michael Fried’s notion of “absorption”, and particularly that interpretation of it offered by Lacanian cultural theorist Joan Copjec in ‘The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act’ in her collection Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. (shrink)