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In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek 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. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought...
In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.
Imagine Fredric Jameson--the world's foremost Marxist critic--kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes. In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works--including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, ...
Poetry. THE BENJAMIN SONNETS is a series of poems created through a process of "homophonic" translation from German writings by Walter Benjamin. They are ridiculous, but only in the sense that things unexpected and wonderful can be ridiculous. "I once sat for about 120 minutes in a film by Mizoguchi in Japanese without subtitles; after 15 minutes every word had a meaning, the entire dialog seemed to be in a patois composed from German, Spanish, French, Greek and English components. I understood it, but its light, ironic nonsense contradicted hilariously with the solemn acts on the court of some Shogun which was the content of the images. I have never felt like this again, except under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, until I read Clint Burnham's BENJAMIN SONNETS, except that the backdrop here was not some aristocratic Japanese scenery, but Berlin. Benjamin himself has felt like this when, under the influence of something, he saw Venice in the upper Kurfuestentstrasse. Architecture and language, once you're able to forget or not know how to speak it, always make their own sense"--Diedrich Diedrichsen.
The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of masterpieces that engage the ethical and moral consciousness of our times, including Unforgiven, Mi...
The original Vancouver Subhumans meet Wyndham Lewis in a back alley, beat the hell out of him, take all of his money, use it to buy drugs and booze, then sit down in a seedy Gastown bar and begin to write poetry based on the contents of Lewis's briefcase. The results might be something like Buddyland.
This book explores the phases of Jacques Lacan's career and examines the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.
In the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In Cryptomimesis Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Gothic to theorize what she calls Derrida's "poetics of the crypt." She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised to accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain "Gothic" stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise to questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's Madeline and Roderick Usher,...
Gastro-Modernism ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with the food culture to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.
This book aims to investigate the unconscious in literature using Freudian and Lacanian psychology to analyse the unconscious in a range of literary works. The works of Thomas Hardy, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch are discussed in the first chapter through eight. Based on the argument in these chapters, this volume considers the environmental problem by examining the unconscious in the literary texts, including poetry, in the light of philosophers and critics on ecology. There is a focus on the Oedipus complex, the death drive, and the unsymbolic void, as they have much relevance to each other in the unconscious as to one’s relationship with others, primarily with the mother, and underlie the plots and leitmotifs of the literary texts discussed. The author carefully examines the complicated relationship between the infringement of the pleasure principle, and the unsymbolic void, and how they are depicted as various phases of nature.