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The Ethics of Opting Out
In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the ideological divisions that have animated queer theory during the last decade, paying particular attention to the field's rejection of dominant neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, and self-actualization. More specifically, she focuses on queer negativity in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and on the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz. Ruti highlights the ways in which queer theory's desire to opt out of normative society rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely innovative ways at the same time as she resists turning antinormativity into a new norm. This wide-ranging and thoughtful book maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory in order to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.
Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings
Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded—that things will eventually get better—Ruti d...
The Call of Character
Should we feel inadequate for failing to be healthy, balanced, and well-adjusted? Is such an existential equilibrium realistic or even desirable? Condemning our cultural obsession with cheerfulness and “positive thinking,” Mari Ruti calls for a resurrection of character that honors our more eccentric frequencies, arguing that sometimes the most tormented and anxiety-ridden life can also be the most rewarding. Ruti critiques our current search for personal meaning and the pragmatic attempt to normalize human beings’ unruly and idiosyncratic natures. Exposing the tragic banality of a happy life commonly lived, she instead emphasizes the advantages of a lopsided life rich in passion and f...
A World of Fragile Things
Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”
The Summons of Love
We are conditioned to think love's purpose is to heal wounds, make us happy, and give our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs, and love causes us to feel fractured, disenchanted, and full of existential turmoil, our suffering is compounded by the sense that love has failed us, or that we've failed to experience what so many others effortlessly enjoy.In this eloquently argued, psychologically-informed book, Mari Ruti portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon prompting us to access the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important as its triumph.
Reinventing the Soul
Essential reading for scholars and students in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. How does the self care for itself in the posthumanist era? What psychic processes might allow the postmodern subject to find meaning and value in its life? Is it possible to delineate a theory of psychic potentiality that is compatible with poststructuralist models of fluid, decentered, and polyvalent subjectivity? Reinventing the Soul offers a new perspective on what it means to be a human being and to strive in the world despite the wounding effects of the socialization process. Drawing on the rich legacies of French poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ruti builds an affirmative a...
The Case for Falling in Love
Praise for The Case for Falling in Love "Why play 'hard to get' when you can just get what you want? Mari Ruti's lively research, from Plato to Freud to Gossip Girl to her own bedroom, finally puts an end to playing games, and provides a resource for lovers and the love-scorned alike. A must-read for anyone who has ever fallen in love, wants to, or wants to know what went wrong." —Arianne Cohen, creator of TheSexDiariesProject.com "At last, a relationship advice book that will actually work. If you're intelligent, interested in love, and like a book you can't put down, this is it. John Gray, move over. The brilliant Mari Ruti has arrived." —Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston Co...
Distillations
Distilling into concise and focused formulations many of the main ideas that Mari Ruti has sought to articulate throughout her writing career, this book reflects on the general state of contemporary theory as it relates to posthumanist ethics, political resistance, subjectivity, agency, desire, and bad feelings such as anxiety. It offers a critique of progressive theory's tendency to advance extreme models of revolt that have little real-life applicability. The chapters move fluidly between several theoretical registers, the most obvious of these being continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, Butlerian ethics, affect theory, and queer theory. One of the central aims of Distillations is to explore the largely uncharted territory between psychoanalysis and affect theory, which are frequently pitted against each other as hopelessly incompatible, but which Ruti shows can be brought into a productive dialogue.
The Age of Scientific Sexism
We trust our sciences to operate on a plane of objectivity and fact in a world of subjectivity and cultural ideologies, but should we? In The Age of Scientific Sexism, philosopher Mari Ruti offers a sharp critique of the gender profiling tendencies of evolutionary psychology, untangling the insidious threads of various gender mythologies that have infiltrated-or perhaps even define-this faux-science. Selling stereotypes as scientific facts, evolutionary psychology continually brings retrograde models of sexuality into mainstream culture: it insists that men and women live in two completely different psychological, emotional, and sexual universes, and that they will consequently always be loc...
Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan
Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan explores convergences and divergences in the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, with a special focus on the implications of their work for critical theory, broadly construed. The book is co-authored in the form of a dialogue between Amy Allen, a prominent representative of Frankfurt School critical theory with expertise on Klein, and Mari Ruti, a leading Lacanian critical theorist. Klein and Lacan are among the two most important and influential psychoanalytic theorists after Freud. Their work has profound implications for how we understand subjectivity, intersubjectivity, autonomy, agency, desire, affect, trauma, history, and the potential for individual and social change. Allen and Ruti offer distinctive interpretations of Klein and Lacan that not only bring out their complexities but also highlight productive points of convergence where most psychoanalytic and critical theorists see irreconcilable differences. The book is organized around key themes that cut across and through the work of Klein and Lacan, culminating in an assessment of the implications of their theories for thinking about politics.
