A disturbing and radical examination of the status of women and the role of violence in contemporary culture and politics.
The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of "irrational" violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as the basis for a renewal of the Marxist theory of ideology. The author's analysis leads into a study of the figure of woman in modern art and ideology, including studies of The Crying Game and the films of David Lynch, and the links between violence and power/gender relations.Book Description
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“Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj.” (Judith Butler )
“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.” (Terry Eagleton )
“The Giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.” (Village Voice )
“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in some decades.” (Terry Eagleton )
“The Giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus.” (Village Voice )
About the Author
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Living in the End Times, and First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
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"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intense yet Palatable,
By
This review is from: The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)
This book is complied of 6 short essays by Zizek. Here we have postmod writing; however, not as difficult as Derrida.
Zizek goes through a genealogy of psychoanalysis & film featuring Freud, Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Habermas & Frankfurt School, Derrida, Weininger and Lynch. He proceeds to discuss courtly love and anti-feminisms of Weininger. His marxist inclinations do not come out as strongly as I thought he would. His logic and analysis are not too difficult to follow but definitely require several re-reads. The essays are well structured one after the other. I think this is a cohesive compilation. I have yet to read The Ticklish Subject but I have high expectations for it. I find his essay on courtly love well-written - not surprising in thoughts but the writing is pleasurable to read. He's a feminist to an extent.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive: intellectual fireworks,
By Edward G. Nilges "Author, 'Build Your Own .Ne... (Hong Kong, China) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)
Zizek writes in the tradition of Adorno, because he takes the Continental philosophical tradition seriously, and, he understands it. I don't pretend to understand this book in full, but, reading it is not as anhedonic as my first encounter with Adorno in the 1980s, when I forced myself to attend to Adorno as a form of therapy-in-recovery.
That's because Zizek is much more chukka chukka hip about popular culture and uses it, along with the canon, to make his points, whereas Adorno would refer to far more obscure literary texts. But both write in the shadow of what Arthur Koestler called a god that failed (Communism). Zizek writes as another Moloch, another god, fails, and that's globalized capitalism where the condition of entry is self-objectification narrated as freedom to choose. Freedom to choose...what? Zizek writes from the standpoint of the idle fellow temporarily stranded in a small city on business back when there were movie theaters showing second-run films, and who wanders into the theater like Parsifal in the enchanted castle or at the puppet show, and masochistically gives himself over to an enjoyment which hasn't yet metastasised into its perverse reverse. The chapter on the extreme, almost catatonically anti-feminist Otto Weininger is interesting because unlike traditional political movements, feminism doesn't get to see its opposite. The reaction towards feminism hastens, whether religious or not, for the most part, to agree with its adversary and to make all sorts of concessions which are often accepted with a great deal of suspicion...as if feminism sought more an adversary like the late Norman Mailer with a mind of his own, who believed feminism just wrong and who invited many feminists to fart in a bottle and paint it. Marxism had in fact the American opposition to Marxism root and branch which started soon after the (American) civil war, and union busters, and finally the mad woman, Thatcher. Of course, opposition doesn't always invigorate a cause. Thatcherism and Reagan dealt a death blow to a Marxism already weakened by the discovery that Leninism didn't end competition in the new society. But, the second-wave feminism had only one man to talk back while the others, until Zizek, were T. S. Eliot's dried voices whispering together. Don't get me wrong. Zizek, in my understanding, isn't opposed to feminism. But, he won't go along with a womyn-centered programme drained of humanism, either. His invocation of the angry ghost of Weininger is as if to say, it still moves: culture *as we know it* is male, and is being destroyed by a metastasing American consumption barbarism which won't sign the Kyoto accords and is in hock to China...so, you better call it down and ring, you better pawn it babe: European culture is appreciating like the Euro itself. Like writing in Adorno, it is a home for the homeless mind. Perhaps "male" and "female" as adjectives are just too abstract to attach to anything but men and animals to describe their sex, and even this would require an interpretation of the pointy thing, and the receptive thing. Zizek comes in fact close to celebrating the male "detachment" which looked upon calmly, Spinozistically, sub specie aeternitatis and all that is simply independence from a set of biological concerns which are the domain of the female, having to do with the reproduction of daily life so celebrated by Tolstoy. Equally attractive is a feminine aporia, and this is the lack of the need to invade Russia. Specific "tough broads" like Hilary Clinton repel because the matching aporias are vulnerabilities absent in her...the invulnerable has no need of us. An "androgyne" male politician wouldn't be at all the mathematical opposite of Hilary; Zizek takes pains to remind us that in dialectics, the opposite isn't quantitatively the same as is ~p to p in traditional logic (which could without loss of signal represent p's negation as p, and its assertion as ~p). No, if someone came along scoring high as female and male, exceeding 100%, they'd lock him up. In a sense Kennedy, to a lesser extent Clinton, were steps in this direction and the hatred they attracted PLUS their attractiveness also was "out of the box": Kennedy was murdered by a man in sexual rage (probably not by a conspiracy after all, but, if you like, a conspiracy fueled by high-class sexual rage against early detente), and by the Clinton era, the fulminations of the likes of Rep. Bob "B1 Bob" Dornan were frightening...he saw Clinton as the AntiChrist. Zizek provides tools, if that's the word, which it probably isn't, to think about the whole where the whole is untrue.
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