Consider sublimation -- conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from
If the most interesting theoretical interventions emerge today from the interspaces between fields, then the foremost interspaceman is Slavoj Žižek. In Incontinence of the Void (the title is inspired
Most theories of laughter do not begin with laughter but with the laughable object, Variously conceived of as the comic, the humorous, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In Laughter, Anc
"What matters is not so much that ?i?ek is endorsing a demythologized,disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what hesometimes claims) a heterodox v
Seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by discussing the "parallax gap," which separates two points because of the displacement of an object resulting from a change in observational position.
Countering the call by some "pro-Lacanians" for an end to the exegesis ofLacan's work--and the dismissal by "anti-Lacanians" of Lacan as impossiblyimpenetrable--Subjectivity and Otherness argues for L
NSK is considered by many to be the last true avant-garde of the twentieth centuryand the most consistently challenging artistic force in Eastern Europe today. The acronym refers toNeue Slowenische Ku
An argument that what is usually dismissed as the "mystical shell" of Hegel's thought -- the concept of absolute knowledge -- is actually its most "rational kernel."This book sets out from a counterin
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is o
In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom
Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the
Slavoj Zizek has been called "an academic rock star" and "the wild man of theory"; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect curren
What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupancic counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time"
A specter is haunting philosophy -- the specter of Hamlet. Why is this? Wherefore?What should we do?Entering from stage left: the philosopher's Hamlet. Thephilosopher's Hamlet is a conceptual characte
The “formidably brilliant” Žižek considers sexuality, ontology, subjectivity, and Marxian critiques of political economy by way of Lacanian psychoanalysis.If the most interesting theoretical intervent
"What matters is not so much that ?i?ek is endorsing a demythologized,disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what hesometimes claims) a heterodox v
"Can Freud be 'updated' in the twenty-first century, or is he a venerated but outmoded genius?" asks Jerry Aline Flieger. In Is Oedipus Online? Flieger stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and t
What if Jacques Lacan--the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst--had workedas a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clipstarring Peter
In Liquidation World, Alexi Kukuljevic examines a distinctive form of subjectivity animating the avant-garde: that of the darkly humorous and utterly disoriented subject of modernity, a dissolute fig
