Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859844601
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
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.
Author: Ellen Blumenstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
In the continual disappointment of failed political and social utopias--the 60 and the Eastern Bloc come to mind--artists, like everyone else, often find themselves indulging melancholic nostalgia. Between Two Deaths collects work addressing those feelings of uneasiness and loss, critical-artistic reflections on the political, social and cultural trends towards regret and retrospection. The assembled work observes conservative cultural debates, stagnation, regression, fear, insecurity, lethargy and nostalgia, not with censure but with interest--with curiosity about these feelings, and about the cynical pessimism or oft-prescribed optimism that follows. With contributions from Bas Jan Ader, Sebastian Diaz-Morales, Elin Hansdottir, Jutta Koether, Javier Téllez, and Mark Titchner, Harry Dodge, Sue de Beer, Stanya Kahn, Brock Enright and Barnaby Furnass.
Author: Philip E. Wegner
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second death,” an event that repeats an earlier “fall,” in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By describing 9/11 as a repetition, Wegner does not deny its significance. Rather, he argues that it was only with the fall of the towers that the symbolic universe of the Cold War was finally destroyed and a true “new world order,” in which the United States assumed disturbing new powers, was put into place. Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.
Author: Charles R. Kim
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295746335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea, interdisciplinary essays explore the changing ways in which Korean historical agents have considered what constitutes a sociopolitically meaningful death and how the surviving community should remember such events. Among the topics covered are the implications of women’s chaste suicides and men’s righteous killings in the evolving Confucian-influenced social order of the latter half of the Chosŏn Dynasty; changing nation-centered constructions of sacrifice and martyrdom put forth by influential intellectual figures in mid-twentieth-century South Korea, which were informed by the politics of postcolonial transition and Cold War ideology; and the decisive role of martyrdom in South Korea’s interlinked democracy and labor movements, including Chun Tae-il’s self-immolation in 1970, the loss of hundreds of lives during the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, and the escalation of protest suicides in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Author: Carlo Salzani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319919237
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The past decades have seen a growing “philosophical” interest in a number of authors, but strangely enough Saramago’s oeuvre has been left somewhat aside. This volume aims at filling this gap by providing a diverse range of philosophical perspectives and expositions on Saramago’s work. The chapters explore some possible issues arising from his works: from his use of Plato’s allegory of the cave to his re-readings of Biblical stories; from his critique and “reinvention” of philosophy of history to his allegorical exploration of alternative histories; from his humorous approach to our being-towards-death to the revolutionary political charge of his fiction. The essays here confront Saramago’s fiction with concepts, theories, and suggestions belonging to various philosophical traditions and philosophers including Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Patočka, Derrida, Agamben, and Žižek.
Author: Roger Beebe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383373
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
This collection brings new voices and new perspectives to the study of popular—and particularly rock—music. Focusing on a variety of artists and music forms, Rock Over the Edge asks what happens to rock criticism when rock is no longer a coherent concept. To work toward an answer, contributors investigate previously neglected genres and styles, such as “lo fi,” alternative country, and “rock en español,” while offering a fresh look at such familiar figures as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Kurt Cobain. Bridging the disciplines of musicology and cultural studies, the collection has two primary goals: to seek out a language for talking about music culture and to look at the relationship of music to culture in general. The editors’ introduction provides a backward glance at recent rock criticism and also looks to the future of the rapidly expanding discipline of popular music studies. Taking seriously the implications of critical theory for the study of non-literary aesthetic endeavors, the volume also addresses such issues as the affective power of popular music and the psychic construction of fandom. Rock Over the Edge will appeal to scholars and students in popular music studies and American Studies as well as general readers interested in popular music. Contributors. Ian Balfour, Roger Beebe, Michael Coyle, Robert Fink, Denise Fulbrook, Tony Grajeda, Lawrence Grossberg, Trent Hill, Josh Kun, Jason Middleton, Lisa Ann Parks, Ben Saunders, John J. Sheinbaum, Gayle Wald, Warren Zanes
Author: Amit R. Baishya
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429944454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
The Northeast Indian borderlands, a cultural crossroads between South, Southeast and East Asia, constitute an important post-colonial exception to the narratives of nation, troubling the common perception of India as an ostensibly liberal regime. This book is the first to consider the representations of the effects of political terror and survival in contemporary literature from Northeast India. Fictions from this polyglot region offer alternative representations that show the post-colonial nation-state to engage in acts of aggression that parallel colonial regimes. The militarization of everyday life and the subsequent growth of cultures of impunity has left a lasting impact on ordinary existence in this border zone. Like in the much more widely discussed case of Kashmir, the governance of the Northeast region is not characterized so much by the management of life, the domain of what Michel Foucault calls biopolitics, but rather around the preponderance and distribution of death, what the postcolonial critic Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics. Not surprisingly, along with Mbembe’s theorizations, the influential works of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, on 'bare life' have provided fruitful pathways to a study of the sovereign politics of death and political terror in this region. The author draws upon the conceptual literature on political terror and sovereign power through a reading of Anglophone fictions alongside Assamese fictional narratives (all published after 1990), but shifts the onus from the 'why' of violence to the 'how' of lived experience. An original study of contemporary survivalist fictions that explores survival under conditions of civil and military threat, this book is a valuable contribution to the field of contemporary global literature focusing on cartographies of death and sovereign terror and postcolonial literature.
Author: Maria Aristodemou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134640382
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' we say in a court of law. 'In a court of law, the truth is precisely what we will not say', says Lacan. ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted’, writes Dostoyevsky. ‘If God is dead, everything is prohibited’, responds Lacan. ‘I think, therefore I am’, reasons Descartes. ‘I am where I do not think’, concludes Lacan. What are we to make of Lacan’s inversions of these mottos? And what are the implications for the legal system if we take them seriously? This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, ‘reason’ and ‘reality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’ and ‘punishment’, acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether ‘it is not psychology that deserves the mockery but the procedure of judicial enquiry’. A unique study on the nexus of Law and Psychoanalysis, this book will interest students and scholars of both subjects, as well as general readers looking to explore this perverse and fascinating relationship.
Author: Daniela Carpi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311030113X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.
Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113520778X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera - the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.
