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Set against the collapse of social theory into a theory of ideological discourse, Geoff Boucher sets to work a rigorous mapping of the contemporary field, targeting the relativist implications of this new form of philosophical idealism. Offering a detailed and immanent critique, Boucher concentrates his critical attention on the 'postmarxism' of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. In response Boucher points to 'intersubjectivity' as an exit from postmarxist theory's charmed circle of ideology

Frankfurt School critical theory is perhaps the most significant theory of society to have developed directly from a research programme focused on the critique of political authoritarianism, as it manifested during the interwar decades of the 20th century. The Frankfurt School's analysis of the persistent roots – and therefore the perennial nature – of what it describes as the 'authoritarian personality' remains influential in the analysis of authoritarian populism in the contemporary world, as evidenced by several recent studies. Yet the tendency in these studies is to reference the final formulation of the category, as expressed in Theodor Adorno and co-thinkers' The Authoritarian Personality (1950), as if this were a theoretical readymade that can be unproblematically inserted into a measured assessment of the threat to democracy posed by current authoritarian trends. It is high time that the theoretical commitments and political stakes in the category of the authoritarian personality are re-evaluated, in light of the evolution of the Frankfurt School. In this paper, I review the classical theories of the authoritarian personality, arguing that two quite different versions of the theory – one characterological, the other psychodynamic – can be extracted from Frankfurt School research.

This essay is a symptomatic analysis of a series of political reversals, ethical hesitation and theoretical uncertainties that betray the existence of a s system of antimonies in Slavoj Zizek's work. It begins from an analysis of Zizek's interpretation of psychoanalysis, showing how his treatment of the Lacanian subject results in an antinomic conception of the relation between the symbolic and the real. It is argued that this condemns Zizek to lurch between these antinomic poles, hesitating between the alternatives of total complicity with "obscene enjoyment" or a catastrophic rupture with existing symbolic structures. Next, the politico-theoretical consequences of this conception are investigated, and the political, ethical and theoretical dilemmas that result are examined. These problems are traced to a speculative conception of the relation between subject and object that relies on the metaphysical doctrine of the "identical subject-object." Finally, an alternative project, based in Zizek's early work and which avoids these dilemmas, is suggested. T. K. Brown

This article proposes a new approach to the nature of a core set within fantasy fiction that regards it as a speculative literature of the exploration of subjectivity, one which at its limit conjectures fresh possibilities for the subjective world. To motivate acceptance of this proposed approach, I begin by surveying the existing state of debate in the critical field. I notice the emergence of widening agreement on the idea that fantasy is a literature of the impossible. I then develop the logical implications of this widening agreement in the critical field, arguing that it entails a representational definition of fantasy literature, which implies a modal approach to the core set that defines this literary order. I suggest that the marvellous mode, the kind of writing which represents the impossible, is a broad class that includes other speculative literatures, and that what differentiates these is the referential world within which the impossible happens. The aim here is to break up monolithic conceptions of the impossible, while pointing to a motivation for developing an understanding of the specificity of a core set of fantasy texts that proceeds by way of contrasts. After explaining why I am extremely skeptical about the definition of science fiction as a "literature of the possible", I probe descriptions of the difference between fantasy and sci-fi. I propose that whereas some science fiction is a literature of conjectural objectivity, guided by the "cognitive novum", a significant group of fantasy texts is a literature of speculative subjectivity, guided by an "affective novum".

Jeanette Winterson's magical realist love stories, such as The Passion, have been read by some critics in terms of a tendency to idealise romance as a transformative passion that transcends social structures. In this article, I propose that Winterson's recent gothic novel, The Daylight Gate, critically revises a set of Romantic themes first broached in The Passion, exposing and interrogating the fantasy scenario at the centre of romantic love. This narrative about magic and the devil explores the ambivalence of passion as possession—diabolical and contractual—before using this to critique the desire for transcendence implied by "undying love". Metaphysics becomes a metaphor for metapsychology, where the Romantic motif of undying love as connected to fatal desire is complicated by a traversal of the fantasy of the union of two immortal souls. These revisions have the effect of reversing the implications of Winterson's earlier treatment of romantic love, turning it back from the personal towards engagement with the political.