Per Versions Of Love And Hate

Why, when we are desperately in love, do we endlessly block union with our love object? Why do we often destroy what we love most? Why do we search out the impossible object? Is it that we desire things because they are unavailable, and therefore, to keep desire alive, we need to prevent its fulfillment? Renata Salecl explores the distributing and complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal and destructive drives, through an investigation of phenomenon as diverse as the novels The Age of Innocence and The Remains of the Day, classic Hollywood melodramas, the Sirens’ song, Ceaușescu's Rumania and the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate presents a unique and timely intervention in contemporary debates by questioning the legitimacy of the calls for tolerance and respect by multiculturalism and exploring practices such as body-mutilation as symptoms of the radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society.

Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues. Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics, ethics, history and politics. This Encyclopedia offers a wide-range of perspectives on postmodernism that illustrates the plurality of this critical concept that is so much part of our current intellectual debates. In this regard, the volume does not adhere to a single definition of postmodernism as much as it documents the use of the term across a variety of academic and cultural pursuits. The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, it must be noted, resists simply presenting postmodernism as a new style among many styles occuring in the post-disciplinary academy. Documenting the use of the term acknowledges that postmodernism has a much deeper and long-lasting effect on academic and cultural life. In general, the volume rests on the understanding that postmodernism is not so much a style as it is an on-going process, a process of both disintegration and reformation.

Jacques Lacan: The Basics provides a clear and succinct introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan, one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. Lacan’s ideas are applied in the study of the humanities, politics, and psychology as well as contemporary media and the arts, but their complexity makes them impenetrable to many. This book is unique in explaining the key concepts and context, from Lacan’s understanding of psychoanalysis to drive and desire, in an accessible way without diluting them beyond meaning. Examples from popular culture are used throughout to emphasise the ideas being discussed and a full glossary and list of resources for further reading encourages additional exploration. This engaging and accessible text is essential reading for all those interested in Lacan and his work, as well as students of psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, politics, cultural studies, film studies, and more.

To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites, murderers, and cheats of all types abound.

Contemporary versions of evil demonise modern "fascists", "totalitarian threats", and "Hitlers". As if not obscure enough, fascist evil has been equivocally linked with perversion. This book reveals that both fascism and perversion implicate the non-symbolisable kernel in politics, which becomes the source of their mystification. It argues that the fascist does not take the same discursive position as the pervert does, regarding this symbolic gap. The author develops a new rhetoric, de-pathologised and de-ideologised, regarding the structure of the so-called pervert, introducing new vocabularies and directions for psychoanalytic research that further distance the pervert, or whom he calls the "extra-ordinary subject", from fascist politics and, instead, exposes his diachronic "fascist" isolation from the social edifice. This reveals the fruitful alternatives that can stem from a "return to Freud cum Lacan", which supports a flexible on-going reformulation of psychoanalytic knowledge.

With his characteristic wit, Zizek addresses the burning question of how to reformulate a leftist project in an era of global capitalism and liberal-democratic multiculturalism. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.