Žižek as comedian: jokes in the service of philosophy.

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political (...) significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations. -- Back cover. (shrink)

The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of radical politics, philosophy, film (Hitchcock, Fight Club ), and psychoanalysis. Of Organs without Bodies Joan Copjec ( Imagine There's No Woman ) has written: "With all his ususal humor and invention, Zizek -- the acknowledged master of the 180 degree turn -- here takes a trip into "enemy" territory to deliver Deleuze of (...) a marvelously rebellious child, one that seriously challenges Deleuze's other progeny with a surprising but convincing bid for succession. Those who thought Deleuze's forward march into the future would follow a straight path are forced to rethink their stance. From now on all readings of Deleuze will have to take a detour through this important -- even necessary -- book." Eric Santner ( On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life ) describes Organs without Bodies as offering "an entirely new degree of conceptual clarity and political urgency. Through his deep engagement with the logic of Deleuze's project, Zizek opens up new possibilities of thought beyond the terms of the current political debates on globalization, democratization, war on terror. Once again, Zizek has produced an utterly timely and radically untimely meditation." Recently profiled in The New Yorker , and hailed by the Village Voice as "the giant of Ljubljana," Zizek is one of the most provocative and entertaining thinkers at work today. (shrink)

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel, Slavoj Žižek gives us a reading of a philosophical giant that changes our way of thinking about the post-human era we are entering. No ordinary study of Hegel, Hegel in a Wired Brain reveals our time as it appears through Hegel's eyes. Focusing in on the idea of the wired brain, this is a philosophical analysis of what happens when a direct link between our mental processes and a (...) digital machine emerges. Here Žižek explores the phenomenon of a wired brain affect, and the notion of singularity subsequently arising when we can share our thoughts and experiences with others. He hones in on the key question of how it affects our experience and status as free human individuals, dealing with what happens with the human spirit, our subjectivity and the very essence of being-human when a machine can read, action and disperse our thoughts. With characteristic verve and energy, Žižek connects Hegel to the world we live in and shows why he is much more fun than anyone gives him credit for, and why the 21st century might just be Hegelian. (shrink)

Book synopsis: In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek looks for the kernel of truth in the totalitarian politics of the past. Examining Heidegger's seduction by fascism and Foucault's flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the 'right steps in the wrong direction.' On the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and horror, there was a valuable core of idealism lost beneath the (...) bloodshed. A redemptive vision has been obscured by the soft, decentralized politics of the liberal-democratic consensus. Faced with the coming ecological crisis, Zizekk argues the case for revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat. A return to past ideals is needed despite the risks. In the words of Samuel Beckett: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'. (shrink)

The Invisible Remainder' begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the 'Ages of the World.

In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Žižek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time. In _Tarrying with the Negative_, Žižek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the (...) way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Žižek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? _No_ is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Žižek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans—Žižek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Žižek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment. Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other—opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism—this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries. (shrink)

With the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are from from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis. For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own (...) enjoyment of "popular culture" makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

What do we know about Hegel? What do we know about Marx? What do we know about democracy and totalitarianism? Communism and psychoanalysis? What do we know that isn't a platitude that we've heard a thousand times - or a self-satisfied certainty? Through his brilliant reading of Hegel, Slavoj Zizek - one of the most provocative and widely-read thinkers of our time - upends our traditional understanding, dynamites every cliché and undermines every conviction in order to clear the ground for (...) new ways of answering these questions. When Lacan described Hegel as the ‘most sublime hysteric’, he was referring to the way that the hysteric asks questions because he experiences his own desire as if it were the Other's desire. In the dialectical process, the question asked of the Other is resolved through a reflexive turn in which the question begins to function as its own answer. We had made Hegel into the theorist of abstraction and reaction, but by reading Hegel with Lacan, Zizek unveils a Hegel of the concrete and of revolution - his own, and the one to come. This early and dazzlingly original work by Zizek offers a unique insight into the ideas which have since become hallmarks of his mature thought. It will be of great interest to anyone interested in critical theory, philosophy and contemporary social thought. (shrink)

The concept of disparity has long been a topic of obsession and argument for philosophers but Slavoj Žižek would argue that what disparity and negativity could mean, might mean and should mean for us and our lives has never been more hotly debated. Disparities explores contemporary 'negative' philosophies from Catherine Malabou's plasticity, Julia Kristeva's abjection and Robert Pippin's self-consciousness to the God of negative theology, new realisms and post-humanism and draws a radical line under them. Instead of establishing a dialogue (...) with these other ideas of disparity, Slavoj Žižek wants to establish a definite departure, a totally different idea of disparity based on an imaginative dialectical materialism. This notion of rupturing what has gone before is based on a provocative reading of how philosophers can, if they're honest, engage with each other. Slavoj Žižek borrows Alain Badiou's notion that a true idea is the one that divides. Radically departing from previous formulations of negativity and disparity, Žižek employs a new kind of negativity: namely positing that when a philosopher deals with another philosopher, his or her stance is never one of dialogue, but one of division, of drawing a line that separates truth from falsity. (shrink)

The texts selected here present the entire scope of the Lacan debate, from the late 1970s through the present. Focusing on the four principal domains of Lacan's influence--psychoanalytic theory and practice, philosophy, social sciences, and cultural studies, this set includes a new introduction by the editor and a thorough index.

Reviewed Work: The Leader's Two Bodies: Slavoj Žižek's Postmodern Political Theology by Claudia Breger.

The authors study opera from the perspective of the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and argue that opera's second death corresponded with the rise of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century. With a preface by Lanfossi and an afterword by Alberto Toscano.

“Today, the first notes of a popular baroque piece like Pachelbel's Canon are automatically perceived as the accompaniment, so that we wait for the moment when the melody proper will emerge; since we get no melody but only a more and more intricate polyphonic variation of the melodic accompaniment, we somehow feel "deceived". Where does this horizon of expectation, which sustains our feeling that the melody proper is missing, come from?” An extract on music from Slavoj Žižek’s new book on (...) Hegel to be published in autumn 2017. (shrink)

When we oppose or disagree with something important, do we ever really do it dispassionately? Isn't setting the world to rights or condemning a political opponent always done with a hint of relish, or at least enthusiasm? This book's challenging essays explore the modes in which that transgressive pleasure of political 'jouissance' operates. In this collection, the authors seek out jouissance in the battle against patriarchy, in social revolts, in the age of mechanical surveillance, in the necrosociety of neoliberalism, or (...) the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Drawing on Lacan's insistence that jouissance is intrinsically political by its nature, we can understand how readily psychoanalytic ideas can be put to use across the geopolitical spectrum. (shrink)

Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object's ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history. Building upon Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches (...) not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

Explores and illuminates Slavoj Žižek's impact on our understanding of literary and cultural modernism.

Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks he's a chicken, from the ethicial heroism of Keanu Reeves in speed , to what toilet designs reveal about the national psyche. Tony Myers provides a clear and engaging guide to Zizek's key ideas, explaining the main influences (...) on Zizek's thought, most crucially his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, using examples drawn from popular culture and everyday life. Myers outlines the key issues that Zizek's work has tackled, including: * What is a Subject and why is it so important? * The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real * What is so terrible about Postmodernity? * How can we distinguish reality from ideology? * What is the relationship between men and women? * Why is Racism always a fantasy? Slavoj Zizek is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the thought of the critic whom Terry Eagleton has described as "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades.". (shrink)

With Slavoj Zizek and Michel Foucault, this book brings into dialogue two of the most influential thinkers in contemporary critical theory. Starting from a thorough reassessment of the Foucauldian paradigm of discourse analysis, it explores the theoretical scope, empirical usefulness and political relevance of Zizek's explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist politics. The contrasting comparison between the two thinkers throws into sharp relief the commonalities and irreconcilable differences of their respective approaches to critical theory. By unmasking reality (...) as contingent symbolic fiction, the authors argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in various ways; the point, however, is 'to recognize the Real in what appears to be mere symbolic fiction' (Zizek), and to change it. The analysis of key concepts is accompanied by two empirical case studies which put theory to the test. (shrink)

In recent years, the popularity of the inimitable Slavoj Žižek has perhaps cast a shadow over the collective influence exerted by Slovenian intellectuals on modern day philosophy. Yet despite his image as an isolated genius, this timely book relocates Žižek as a thinker whose ideas are born of a specifically Slovenian context. Although only coming to international notice in the early 1990s, the Slovenian school needs to be understood as the culmination of a series of intellectual, artistic and political movements (...) inextricably connected to the quest for the succession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia. These developments in thought must also be seen in the light of one of the giants of Continental philosophy: Jacques Lacan.Featuring brand new interviews with three of its forerunners - Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic - this fascinating account details each philosopher's individual concerns, whilst shedding light on the complex genealogy and continuing development of the Slovenian Neo-Lacanian school. Rarely are we afforded such an opportunity to study the birth of a philosophy from a seminal moment in modern history. (shrink)

The book shares Žižek's central problem of how to revitalize the radical political left through theory. It initially follows the argument developed in The Ticklish Subject that contemporary leftist thought is divided by antagonism between a Marxist revolutionary politics founded on Enlightenment philosophy and a politics of identity founded on post-modern post-structuralism. How Žižek used Lacan's theory of character structures is examined here to describe this theoretical deadlock and explain how the dominant contemporary ideologies of liberal tolerant multiculturalism and reactionary (...) "pseudo-fundamentalism" compete to mobilize the individual subject's unconscious drive to enjoyment. The book thus emphasizes the moments in which Žižek hints that Lacanian theory may describe a practice that facilitates the resolution of antagonisms that placate radical leftist politics. It challenges prevalent interpretations of Lacanian ends of analysis, to ultimately connect the psychoanalytic cure to the leftist project of social and political liberation. The Subject of Liberation argues that if Lacan is to be useful to leftist politics, then the left has to develop its own definitions of the post-analytic subject, and proposes one such definition developed out of Lacanian and Zizekian theory. (shrink)

Slovenian philosopher bad boy Slavoj Žižek is one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. He publishes at a breakneck speed and lectures around the world. He has an unmistakable speaking style and set of mannerisms that have made him ripe material for internet humor and meme culture. YouTube clips of his talks, interviews, and media appearances often have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. How did an intellectual from a remote Eastern European country come (...) to such notoriety? In this book, sociologist Eliran Bar-El plumbs the "phenomenon called 'Žižek;'" its origin, emergence, and development over the years. He begins with Žižek's early years as a thinker and political figure in Slovenian civil society. There, Žižek became a philosopher, immersed himself in Marxist debates both within academia as well as in activist circles, and even ran for office. Bar-El then turns to Žižek's emergence in the English-speaking world as an intellectual celebrity in the 1990s and the development and perfection of his unique performative style and rhetorical arsenal (Žižek's language of "Hegelacanese"). Post 9/11, Žižek goes global, becoming a well-known op-ed writer and TV commentator on pop culture and large-scale global events such as the War on Terror, the financial crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring of 2011. Things took a turn when Žižek was almost entirely estranged from the normal workings of academia and increasingly became the target of other of other thinkers-Noam Chomsky, notably-who singled him out as an example of intellectual imposture, as well as others outraged by the non-politically correct views he professes. Ultimately, Bar-El shows how Žižek harnessed the power of the digital era in his own self-fashioning as an intellectual, remaking and capitalizing on the shifting intellectual landscape and what Bar-El calls our "knowledge societies." Throughout the book, Bar-El shows how Žižek has navigated different audiences and publics, developing a hybrid language capable of speaking to specialists and laypeople alike, using globally traumatic events as the subject of his often irreverent analyses, combining high and low registers, and flaunting his own lack of expertise and specialization and his "outsider" status as a way to form a substantial extra-academic public and to engage with current events. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek has been widely described as one of the most important and influential contemporary thinkers, philosophers, and cultural critics. However, despite the often critical attention and reviews his work garners in scholarly journal articles and books, systematic philosophical engagements with Žižek's thought remain a surprisingly rare phenomenon. Counteracting this dearth of substantive interaction, the contributors to this volume engage with crucial and fundamental aspects of Žižek's thought. The book follows a Hegelian motivation that is itself dear to Žižek, tracing (...) the concept of dialectical materialism in his more recent work. It takes as its concrete starting point the most current, systematic elaborations of Žižek's thought, namely Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism as well as his magnum opus Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The contributors provide concrete elaborations of arguments developed within these two works, giving voice to their universal implications. The book also features an afterword by Žižek himself, in which he critically examines the work of Levi Bryant as well as the tradition of object-oriented-ontology on the whole. (shrink)

With his characteristic wit, Zizek addresses the burning question of how to reformulate a leftist project in an era of global capitalism and liberal-democratic ...

In this major new work the leading philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that philosophical materialism has failed to meet the key scientific, theoretical and political challenges of the modern world, from relativity theory and quantum physics to Freudian psychoanalysis and the failure of twentieth-century Communism. To bring materialism up to date, Žižek proposes a new foundation for dialectical materialism. He argues that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designates as the speculative approach of thought - all (...) other forms of materialism fail. In Absolute Recoil, Žižek offers a startling reformulation of the ground and possibilities of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of "irrational" violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, ...

With a new introduction by the author In this deliciously polemical work, a giant of cultural theory immerses himself in the ideas of a giant of French thought.

In this new book, Marko Zlomislić argues that Slavoj Žižek's work does not contain any sort of radical emancipatory project, especially as it passes through the ideology of communism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The evidence for the failure of communism is vast and includes the more than six hundred mass graves recently located in Žižek's homeland of Slovenia. Zlomislić demonstrates that the way out of the capitalist dilemma is not a repetition of communism but a return to the late medieval notion (...) of haecceity or "individual thisness" that was rejected by modernity. Haecceity, or the indescribable and indefinite here and now of the person, shows that the late medieval Franciscans were already "postmodernists." It is no wonder that the totalitarianism of the modernist Hegel is embraced by thinkers such as Žižek, Badiou, Hardt, Negri, and Laclau and was already rejected by Leibnitz, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Levinas, Deleuze, and Derrida. This important book shows that Žižek's work must be rejected because it does not uphold the dignity, worth, and uniqueness of the person. (shrink)

The paper attempts to trace the relevance of the work of Slavoj Žižek in the field of practical opera composition, taking as example the Greek contemporary opera Anthony’s Death, which dramatizes a multitude of Žižekian topics and concludes with a sung Žižek text. The paper argues that the tension between the dimensions of Meaning and Voice is constitutive of the genre of opera itself, and exhibits the strategies used by Anthony’s Death to thematize this disjunction. The work’s structure is then (...) examined as an attempt to artistically render several Žižekian topoi and from the point of view of the different uses it subjects Žižek’s text to. The vicissitudes of thought submitted to musical treatment are considered next, and it is argued that a “fall” from Meaning into Sound is inevitable when abstract thought is sung. Finally, the importance of Žižek’s work for contemporary opera is located on the level of operatic form, for which it is asserted that it has the ability to act as a potentially vivifying catalyst. (shrink)

La parallaxe est le déplacement apparent d'un objet que provoque un changement du point d'observation. Le philosophe ajoutera que la différence observée n'est pas simplement subjective. Dans la terminologie hégélienne, on dira plutôt que le sujet et l'objet sont en fait intrinsèquement " médiatisés " si bien qu'un changement épistémologique dans le point de vue du sujet traduit toujours un changement ontologique dans l'objet lui-même. On connaît aujourd'hui toute une série de parallaxes, dans des domaines très différents. Dans la physique (...) quantique ; dans la neurobiologie ; la parallaxe de la différence ontologique la discordance entre l'ontique et l'ontologique ; la parallaxe du Réel la parallaxe de l'inconscient, qui commande l'absence de mesure commune entre les deux aspects de l'édifice théorique de Freud l'interprétation des formations de l'inconscient et la théorie des pulsions ; et enfin la parallaxe politique, dont le vieux nom est " lutte des classes ". Finalement, ce livre tente de renouveler le matérialisme dialectique, tout en restant fidèle au projet communiste. (shrink)

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek (...) brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek is regarded as one of the pre-eminent European cultural theorists of the last decade. His growing body of work has generated considerable controversy and transformed the way we think about issues of popular culture and politics. This volume provides a critical reflection on Zizek's ideas and his intellectual itinerary. As well as bringing a Zizekian analysis to a discussion of the cultural and social aspects of nationhood in New Zealand and the Southern hemisphere, it will provide readers with (...) new material and fresh perspectives on Zizek's thinking on psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, television and the new media, ethics and politics. It is proposed that Zizek's arresting, and at times scandalous, re-elaboration of psychoanalytical theory and his critique of ideology will open the way for a new understanding of social conflict. FROM Z TO A contains approaches that are challenging and fascinating: What really happened when Paul Holmes interviewed Dennis Connor? Why do we watch reality TV? Is the Treaty of Waitangi a fraud? Why has Peter Ellis come to represent par excellence the figure of sexual threat to children? Why does Ada in Jane Campion's 'The Piano' send a love letter to Baines who cannot read? What psychic mechanisms of nationalism are displayed in British football hooliganism? How did Western orientalism shape Japanese national identity? Why is the discourse of nationhood in the United States always structured around a central void or impossibility? The range of topics demonstrates both the power of Zizek's formulations and the light they can shed on our world. (shrink)

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.

From film theory to post-theory -- Sublime objects of cinema -- Class struggle in film studies -- Interlude: the pervert and the analyst -- Cinema, ideology, and form -- Enjoyment in the cinema -- Conclusion: theory as realism set in drive.

Os autores convidados se dispuseram a escrever a fronteira tensa onde se vislumbra o que não pode ser escrito e demonstraram o 'inacabamento' do saber e a opacidade de um objeto que ou se recusa a ser apropriado por categorias filosóficas anteriores a Freud, ou exige a reinvenção de seus contornos. Por isso, também, o livro encontra-se dividido em seções criadas a partir das contribuições dos autores. Os organizadores recusaram, intencionalmente, o caminho fácil de aceitar as áreas de saber tradicionalmente (...) definidas no campo da filosofia, tais como epistemologia, ética, estética etc., como naturalmente dadas. Preferiram agrupar os trabalhos em temas que revelam de que modo aparecem alguns pontos críticos na interface entre as duas áreas - o tempo e a contingência, a coisa e o objeto, o conhecimento e o avesso. (shrink)