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Dealing with the presumed universality of metaphor and its role in the
discourse of philosophy and science, the article discusses, in the first
part, the theses on metaphor as ?all pervading means? of language and
thought, raised by romantic and post-romantic philosophers of language, and
its impact on the meta-discourse on philosophy and science in recent
contemporary contributions by epistemologists of science and language
philosophers. The aim of the article is to show, on one side, that this
universalisation of metaphor has been operative in the recent philosophy
rather as a tacit confusion of metaphors with models and analogies than as
elaboration of the presumed constitutive role of the so-called genuin
metaphor in the rational discourse. On this ground, the article tries to
provide, in the second and the third part, additonal and different arguments
than those raised by ?friends of metaphor? for locating the presumed
?irrationality? of metaphor so as to reexamine the relevance of the
difference between the literality of the underlying linguistic functions and
the emphatic assertion by metaphorical expressions. As a result, in the
fourth part, a different model has been suggested for estimating metaphors as
universal, legitimate, and epistemically innovative in the rational discourse
of philosophy and science. Such a view allows for conceiving of the presumed
?all-pervading? character of transference in language and thought as based on
the universality of linguistic functions and yet enables to consider
metaphors as what they actually are - a particular, but peculiar,
intralinguistic phenomenon without which no insight into the differential and
material character of language and speech seems to be possible at all.

The article discusses the relation between the paradigmatic status of film
and use of film analogies in the psychoanalytic discourse on society and
culture by Slavoj Zizek, which represents the very ground of his
philosophical discourse in general. In the first part, starting with a recent
discussion by different English and American scholars on controversial
aspects of Slavoj Zizek?s activity in academia and on a broader public scene,
the paper discusses on some parallel examples and inherent motivators of the
form-content controversy in philosophy and pop-culture as well as Zizek?s
interpretation of his position. In the second part, the article discusses
Zizek?s sporadic meta-reflection on exemplification and provides arguments
for the thesis that, in Zizek, on the ground of his ontology of the virtual,
one encounters a double conception of ?inherence? (paradigmatic and
analogical) between instance and principle, its consequence is a shift in the
use of film examples from analogy of objects to analogy of analyses, which
invents a typical conflict between the metonymic and metaphorical evasion of
discourse. On this background, the article reexamines the general contention
against Zizek of a ?virtual totalitarianism? without contingency of meaning
and sense, and points to the position of the subject without discourse as
another ground for the condition of analysis of truth. In the third part, the
paper analyses and evaluates Zizek?s own understanding of his cinematographic
illustrations and his peculiar, performing and self-referential, method of
resolving the epistemological problem of film interpretation through
imaginary identification or ?empathy? with film objects. In the fourth part,
the paper discusses the apparent asymmetry between Zizek?s application of
psychoanalytic doctrines onto film criticism, on one side, and, on the other,
his little elaborated apotheosis of so-called ?cinematic materialism?. It is
argued that this asymmetry ultimately causes what Zizek rejects in principle:
a substitution of materialism and contingency of truth-search for a holism of
sense. Consequently this seems to turn the psychoanalytic discourse on
cinematography into a hermeneutic one.

The text deals with the recently renewed issue of ?antiphilosophy? in the self-understanding of some prominent contemporary continental philosophers but not only them, such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, both referring to the psychoanalyst and theoretician of discourse Jacques Lacan. Starting with a metaphorical analysis of the verdict made by Marx of ?merely interpretive? character of philosophy in relation to ?the study of real world? and with his comparison of philosophy with ?masturbation?, the text addresses new appeals to ?antiphilosophy? as samples of a token or rather, as cases of a syndrome connected with Jocasta?s rationalization of Oedipus? curse. It was her discourse based on general rules of rationality with which she unconsciously attempted to avoid the confrontation with the truth of an event (incestuous marriage) which had already occurred. In the text, presuppositions and consequences of such an analogy between ancient and contemporary philosophical material are discussed in order to show-on the basis of arguing that the unconscious is located within (and not beyond) rational processes that subjects undertake in order to respond to rational needs (viz. impulses of the Ego)-that contemporary discussion about ?antiphilosophy? by left-wing philosophers bears unacknowledged tendencies to unconsciously reduce Marx? algorithm of ?realization of philosophy? to the Hegelian negation of the negation and to integrate it into the discourse of academic philosophy.

On the basis of selected examples of average lay as well as professional and theoretical discourses on the media phenomenon and the very notion of media, the author seeks to identify moments conducive to constructing a model for media analysis of a social-theoretical bent, and both structural-semiotic and substantive-critical in character. The analysis refers to the media in both the strict (technological) and the expanded (semiological) meaning of the term - as technical devices and semiotic objects, such as discourses of ideology, science and literature. In the first section (I. 1-3), almost entirely devoted to Marshall McLuhan?s brief and legendary text ?The Medium Is the Message?, his basic thesis is put under a discursive-logical analysis of the text and reverted into the seemingly diametrically opposed form, ?The Message Is the Medium?, whose further interpretive possibilities are then explored. In the second section (II. 1-3) McLuhan?s ?integral? approach to media analysis, as a particular theory (communication theory), is examined by placing it in the discursive context along with the ?End of Ideology? thesis from the 1960s and instances of humanistic-scientific discourse on non-technological media forms (hermeneutic theories of perception, psychoanalysis of narrative strategies in fictional discourses). The aim of the discussion is to relocate the phenomenon of conceptual regression (whether substantive, cultural, or ideological) in discourses presupposing absolute innovativeness and progressiveness of their media form. The result of the inquiry shows that regressive ness lies in the ?progressive? media form itself, that is, in the very conceptions (theories, ideologies) of the form.