Imagine There's No Woman

Imagine There's No Woman PDF Author: Joan Copjec
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262532709
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Imagine There's No Woman

Imagine There's No Woman PDF Author: Joan Copjec
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262532709
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Imagine There's No Heaven

Imagine There's No Heaven PDF Author: Mitchell Stephens
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137002603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The historical achievements of religious belief have been large and well chronicled. But what about the accomplishments of those who have challenged religion? Traveling from classical Greece to twenty-first century America, Imagine There's No Heaven explores the role of disbelief in shaping Western civilization. At each juncture common themes emerge: by questioning the role of gods in the heavens or the role of a God in creating man on earth, nonbelievers help move science forward. By challenging the divine right of monarchs and the strictures of holy books, nonbelievers, including Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, help expand human liberties, and influence the early founding of the United States. Revolutions in science, in politics, in philosophy, in art, and in psychology have been led, on multiple occasions, by those who are free of the constraints of religious life. Mitchell Stephens tells the often-courageous tales of history's most important atheists— like Denis Diderot and Salman Rushdie. Stephens makes a strong and original case for their importance not only to today's New Atheist movement but to the way many of us—believers and nonbelievers—now think and live.

Reinventing World War II

Reinventing World War II PDF Author: Barbara A. Biesecker
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271099003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In this book, Barbara A. Biesecker explores the prestige and rhetorical power of the “Good War,” revealing how it was retooled to restore a new kind of social equilibrium to the United States Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 and its replacement, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Situating these popular memory texts within the culture and history wars of the day and the broader framework of US political and economic life, Biesecker argues that, with the notable exception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, these reinventions of the Good War worked rhetorically to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging fitted to the neoliberal nationalist agenda. By tracing the links between the popular retooling of World War II and the national state fantasy, and by putting the lessons of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors to work for a rhetorical-political analysis of the present, Biesecker not only explains the emergence and strength of the MAGA movement but also calls attention to the power of public memory to shape and contest ethnonational identity today. This book will interest rhetoricians and historians as well as students and scholars in the fields of US politics and communication studies.

Some of These Days

Some of These Days PDF Author: James Donald
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199354014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
With portraits of actors, dancers, architects, poets, directors, and musicians, Some of These Days highlights how the so-called New Negro Movement of the 1920s reverberated far beyond Harlem to cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna to ignite the global renaissance of modernist culture.

Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood

Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood PDF Author: Hauke Lehmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110579723
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this experience? By asking these questions, this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our conception of a critical period in US film history – the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of masterpieces. Rather, the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic images to affect their audiences – to confront them with the new. The films of the New Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the cinema. The study describes a complex interplay between three modes of affectivity: suspense, paranoia, and melancholy. All three, each in their own way, implicate spectators in the deep-seated contradictions of their own feelings and their ways of being in the world: their relations to history, to society, and to cultural fantasy. On this basis, Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood projects an original conception of film history: as an affective history which can be re-written up to the present day.

This Is Not a President

This Is Not a President PDF Author: Diane Rubenstein
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814776205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Read The Chronicle of Higher Ed Author Interview In This Is Not a President, Diane Rubenstein looks at the postmodern presidency — from Reagan and George H. W. Bush, through the current administration, and including Hillary. Focusing on those seemingly inexplicable gaps or blind spots in recent American presidential politics, Rubenstein interrogates symptomatic moments in political rhetoric, popular culture, and presidential behavior to elucidate profound and disturbing changes in the American presidency and the way it embodies a national imaginary. In a series of essays written in real time over the past four presidential administrations, Rubenstein traces the vernacular use of the American presidency (as currency, as grist for popular biography, as fictional TV material) to explore the ways in which the American presidency functions as a “transitional object” that allows the American citizen to meet or discover the president while going about her everyday life. The book argues that it is French theory — primarily Lacanian psychoanalysis and the radical semiotic theories of Jean Baudrillard — that best accounts for American political life today. Through episodes as diverse as Iran Contra, George H. W. Bush vomiting in Japan, the 1992 Republican convention, the failed nomination of Lani Guinier, and the Iraq War, This Is Not a President brilliantly situates our collective investment in American political culture.

The American Optic

The American Optic PDF Author: Mikko Tuhkanen
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438427735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Brings together critical race theory and psychoanalysis to examine African American and other diasporic African cultural texts.

White on White/black on Black

White on White/black on Black PDF Author: George Yancy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742514812
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The book explores how fourteen philosophers, seven white and seven black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization. Combined, the contributions demonstrate different and similar conceptual trajectories of raced identities that emerge from within and across the racial divide. Each of the fourteen philosophers, who share a textual space of exploration, name blackness/whiteness, revealing significant political, cultural, and existential aspects of what it means to be black/white. Through the power of naming and theorizing whiteness and blackness, White on White/Black on Black dares to bring clarity and complexity to our understanding of race identity.

Lars von Trier's Women

Lars von Trier's Women PDF Author: Rex Butler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501322478
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, 'She' in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Editors Rex Butler and David Denny do not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather consider how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and acknowledging the work of prior scholars on the films, Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed 'feminist' politics and social practice.

Feminine Singularity

Feminine Singularity PDF Author: Ronjaunee Chatterjee
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
What happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity—for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject—and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world. Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests across poetry and prose through likeness and minimal difference, rather than individuality and identity. Reading for singularity shows us the ways femininity is fundamentally entangled with racial difference in the nineteenth century and well into the contemporary, as well as how rigid categories can be unsettled and upended. Grappling with the ongoing violence embedded in the Western liberal imaginary, Feminine Singularity invites readers to commune with the subversive potentials in nineteenth-century literature for thinking subjectivity today.