Suchergebnisse

In Fetish, Henry Krips draws together Freudian and Marxian insights to provide accounts of fetishism and the gaze that afford new ways of understanding the relation of the individual to the social, of pleasure to desire. He uses discrete cultural artifacts as windows through which to view local instances of the mediation of pleasure and desire, demonstrating that users of cultural objects adapt them to suit their own strategic ends. Ranging widely over texts and cultures, he discusses Hopi initiation rites, Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, Robert Boyle's early scientific manual New Experiments Physico-Chemical, Toni Morrison's Beloved, the popular television series Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and David Cronenberg's film Crash. Jacques Lacan's theory of the gaze and Louis Althusser's theory of ideology frame Krips's perspectives on fetishism and the discourse of perversion, which he considers in light of postcolonial theory, the history of science, screen theory, and, of course, psychoanalysis. What results is a work remarkable for its clear exposition and its sophisticated synthesis of major theorists, its provocative argument that pleasure comes not from attaining desire but rather from moving around its object-cause

By conceiving interpellation as a general mechanism for the social constitution of human subjects, authors such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek have emancipated interpellation from its conservative roots as an ideological dispositif. I examine this conceptual shift through the work of Ernesto Laclau, who, using interpellation as a model for the Gramscian process of articulation, shifts it from the conservative to the radical side of the political ledger. But, we will see, Laclau's theory runs into various difficulties. I get around these by suggesting a generalization of the concept of interpellation that realizes Althusser's seminal project of combining his own anti-humanist reading of Marx with Lacan's "return to Freud."

A critical analysis of Louis Althusser's social theory essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1971). Rather than accept Althusser's contention that his notions of self-representation & subjectivity are appropriated from a Lacanian theorization of Freud, it is argued that Althusser omits addressing the critical role that desire plays in Sigmund Freud's & Jacques Lacan's readings of subjects. The Freudian notion of repetition is necessary to connect social meaning with individual subjects. It is argued that a Lacanian supplement to Althusser's theory breaks the connection between the constitution of the subject & ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). It is therefore concluded that ISAs create antagonisms that then become the sites of interpellation where the constitution of subjects occurs. 12 References. M. Greenberg

The exercises of modem power which Foucault discusses constitute counterexamples to traditional views of the nature of power. Foucault's views are extended to provide an account of the nature of resistance.

This book addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the "groundless ontological ground" of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world--a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity--that is always already still creating. Event and Decision offers the reader a live experience of this evental theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves. And if the mirror you peer into shows you something foreign, something different than what you know as yourself, then this difference makes reading the book easy. The only impossibility is to lose your way.

This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. The authors come from the different but intersecting worlds of academia, politics and business. The editors have chosen the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage the contributors to adopt a dialogue-oriented approach and in reference to the example of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake 400 years ago for holding heretic views which were probably far more backward than the views of those condemning him. The idea behind this approach was that any complex social process or political attempt to change the lives of people will have unintended consequences, usually paradoxical ones. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory. The volume also contains a short biography of George Soros and a list of his published works and philanthropic initiatives