Looking Awry

Looking Awry PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262740159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Žižek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Žižek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.

Looking Awry

Looking Awry PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262740159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Žižek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Žižek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.

Listening Awry

Listening Awry PDF Author: David Schwarz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452908907
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In his first book, Listening Subjects, David Schwarz succeeded in fusing post-Lacanian psychoanalytic, musical-theoretical, and musical-historical perspectives. In Listening Awry, he expands his project to “tell a story of historical modernism writ large”—how German music spanning two centuries refracts changes in society and culture, as well as the impacts of concepts introduced by psychoanalysis. Schwarz shows how post-Lacanian psychoanalysis can be applied to ideological interpellation that connects psychoanalysis to culture and how music theory can ground these considerations in precise details of musical textuality. He “listens awry” in several ways: by understanding musical meaning in both objective and socially structured ways, by embracing historical and also aesthetic approaches, by addressing high art as well as popular music, and by listening “around” conventional forms of musical meaning to reach toward that which evades signification. Structured around four themes—trauma, the other/Other, the look/gaze binary, and Judaism—Listening Awry explores five key moments in post-Enlightenment music: the rise of the singular orchestral conductor and the emergence of a new form of alterity, the Art Song and “the sublime of the delicate” (a correlate of the Kantian mathematical and dynamical sublime), the birth of psychoanalysis and the twentieth-century turn toward atonality, German war songs and the subversion of German music by the Nazis, and two different versions of Wagner’s Parsifal that were performed one hundred years apart and in radically different contexts. This highly original work, filled with imaginative readings and disquieting observations, links trauma with the culture and history of modernity and German music, deftly tying the experience of the body to the sounds it hears: how it reaches us slowly, penetrates the skin, and resonates. David Schwarz is assistant professor of music at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture.

Tarrying with the Negative

Tarrying with the Negative PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822313953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
DIVA theoretical analysis of social conflict that uses examples from Kant, Hegel, Lacan, popular culture and contemporary politics to critique nationalism./div

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan PDF Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860915928
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
'A modernist work of art is by definition 'incomprehensible'; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: 'you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father ... you've totally missed the point!' if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of 'estranging' the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and—useless to deny it—this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).' Hitchcock is placed on the analyst's couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of 'postmodern' defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that 'everything has meaning', the films' ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into 'serious' Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies. Contributors: Frederic Jameson, Pascal Bonitzer, Miran Bozovic, Michel Chion, Mlladen Dolar, Stojan Pellko, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupancic and Slavoj Zizek.

Four Histories

Four Histories PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140434507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 884

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Book Description
This volume contains the tetralogy of plays-Richard II, Henry IV-Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V-written by Shakespeare c. 1595-1599. In this collection each play is accompanied by notes and an introduction, making this edition of particular value to students and theatre-goers.

Less Than Nothing

Less Than Nothing PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844678970
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1049

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Book Description
A thousand-page resurrection of Hegel, from the bestselling philosopher and critic who has been hailed as “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals” (New York Review of Books) For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing—the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author—Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

How To Read Lacan

How To Read Lacan PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847085407
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
'The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire' Jacques Lacan. Is psychoanalysis dead or are we to read frequent attacks on its theoretical 'mistakes' and clinical 'frauds' as a proof of its vitality? Slavoj Zizek's passionate defence of Lacan reasserts the ethical urgency of psychoanalysis. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to 'normal' sexual enjoyment. Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction 'Enjoy!' Lacan reminds us that psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy. Since for Lacan psychoanalysis itself is a procedure of reading, each chapter uses a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology, applying his ideas to Hegel and Hitchcock, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek

Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek PDF Author: O. Sigurdson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137103116
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Taking its cue from the renewed interest in theology among Marxist and politically radical philosophers or thinkers, this study inquires into the reasons for this interest in theology focusing on the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, as two contemporary prominent Marxist thinkers.

Looking Away

Looking Away PDF Author: Rei Terada
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674032682
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world. Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world “as is” is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics. In guilty evasions of this coercion, post-Kantian thinkers cultivate fleeting, aberrant appearances, perceptual experiences that do not present themselves as facts to be accepted and therefore become images of freedom. This “phenomenophilia,” she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory. Through graceful readings of Coleridge’s obsession with perceptual ephemera, or “spectra,” recorded in his Notebooks; of Kant’s efforts in his First and Third Critiques to come to terms with the given world; of Nietzsche’s responses to Kant and his meditations on ephemeral phenomenal experiences; and of Adorno’s interpretations of both Nietzsche and Kant, Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience “as is,” even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.

Zizek's Jokes

Zizek's Jokes PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535300
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Žižek as comedian: jokes in the service of philosophy. “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein The good news is that this book offers an entertaining but enlightening compilation of Žižekisms. Unlike any other book by Slavoj Žižek, this compact arrangement of jokes culled from his writings provides an index to certain philosophical, political, and sexual themes that preoccupy him. Žižek's Jokes contains the set-ups and punch lines—as well as the offenses and insults—that Žižek is famous for, all in less than 200 pages. So what's the bad news? There is no bad news. There's just the inimitable Slavoj Žižek, disguised as an impossibly erudite, politically incorrect uncle, beginning a sentence, “There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida...“ For Žižek, jokes are amusing stories that offer a shortcut to philosophical insight. He illustrates the logic of the Hegelian triad, for example, with three variations of the “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache” classic: first the wife claims a migraine; then the husband does; then the wife exclaims, “Darling, I have a terrible migraine, so let's have some sex to refresh me!” A punch line about a beer bottle provides a Lacanian lesson about one signifier. And a “truly obscene” version of the famous “aristocrats” joke has the family offering a short course in Hegelian thought rather than a display of unspeakables. Žižek's Jokes contains every joke cited, paraphrased, or narrated in Žižek's work in English (including some in unpublished manuscripts), including different versions of the same joke that make different points in different contexts. The larger point being that comedy is central to Žižek's seriousness.